Ivory Coast president assassination foiled

Mercenaries arrested in France told investigators they were plotting to assassinate Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, Paris prosecutors said today.

French counter-intelligence agents arrested 10 people over the weekend, saying they were implicated in an alleged plot to destabilise the Ivory Coast.

During detention, several of the suspects told investigators they were headed for the Ivory Coast’s commercial capital of Abidjan with the intention of assassinating Gbagbo, prosecutors said.

The suspects informed French investigators of details of their plot, prosecutors said without elaborating.

Ivory Coast, which suffered a nine-month civil war that officially ended in July, has been rattled in the past week by persistent talk of new uprisings, prompting authorities to increase the number of armed soldiers patrolling the streets of Abidjan.

Among those arrested was Ibrahim Coulibaly, a former Ivory Coast army sergeant who led a 1999 coup, but turned power over to General Robert Guei rather than taking over himself, officials said.

Living in exile in Burkina Faso since 2000, Coulibaly had recently announced his intention in French media to return to Ivory Coast.

Prosecutors said some of the mercenaries were French, and others had French-Ivorian double nationality. There was also at least one suspect from Madagascar.

Agents from France’s counterintelligence service, known as the DST, arrested four of the men Saturday at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport as they were about to board a commercial flight to Abidjan.