Guinea-Bissau chief survives coup attempt by soldiers

MUTINOUS soldiers fought their way into the fortified residence of Guinea-Bissau’s president yesterday, launching a three-hour gunbattle with his guards, as the leader and his family hid elsewhere in the building, a top official said.

The soldiers attacked President Joao Bernardo Vieira’s home shortly after midnight, killing at least one of his guards and injuring several others before security forces were able to push them back, Interior Minister Cipriano Cassama said.

The attackers did not reach the room where Vieira was hiding and neither he nor his wife was hurt, Cassama said.

“It’s unacceptable that we should have another coup in this country,” he declared.

Guinea-Bissau has had three coups since 1980, when Vieira himself first took power that way.

Dozens of security forces surrounded the president’s home in a residential area of the capital after hours of artillery and rocket-propelled-grenade fire. Inside, a reporter saw spent shell casings littering the floors, including in the president’s bedroom.

The UN says impoverished Guinea-Bissau, on the Atlantic coast, is a key transit point for cocaine smuggled from Latin America to Europe.

In parliamentary elections held a week ago, opposition leader and former president Kumba Yala accused Vieira of being the country’s top drug trafficker. The president did not comment on the accusation.

Local TV broadcast images of Vieira yesterday meeting with foreign diplomats and government officials in his recently attacked home.

No reports of disturbances elsewhere reached the capital, where shops and restaurants were open and life continued as normal.

President Abdoulaye Wade of neighbouring Senegal ordered troops to the border with Guinea-Bissau after receiving a panicked phone call from Vieira in the night, and offered to send a plane to Bissau to get Vieira and his family, Wade’s spokesman said. He said Vieira has so far declined the offer.

“The troops will stay at the border until we are sure the situation has stabilised,” Senegalese presidential spokesman El Hadj Amadou Sall said.

Wade also called African Union commission chairman Jean Ping to alert him to the situation, Sall said.

Ping issued a statement early yesterday saying the AU rejects “any unconstitutional change of government and condemns in advance any attempt to seize power by force.”

The former Portuguese colony has a history of coups and misrule. Vieira initially seized power in a 1980 coup. He was deposed in another coup in 1998, which ushered in a brief civil war.