Three Ukrainians prevented from boarding a flight to Madagascar on Friday have denied being mercenaries, claiming they were part of an independent television production team, a news report said on Sunday.
The three men, Fanin Dmytro, Vuksta Volodymyr and Mohilnik Konstantin, were forbidden to board a Johannesburg-Antananarivo flight after a search found army-style combat fatigues and a small electricity generator in their luggage.
”To call us mercenaries is an insult. We are not terrorists, but tourists,” Konstantin told the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times newspaper.
He said he and his two colleagues worked for an independent TV production firm, Equites, in Ukraine and were on their way to Madagascar to scout for locations for an 11-month documentary shoot on 37 African countries.
”We are just victims of political games by the Madagascan government,” he added.
Madagascar’s consul general in South Africa, Bruno Ranarivelo, said on Friday the men ”were unable to say where they were going in Madagascar or where they would be staying, just that they would be met at the airport”.
He said the three had travelled from Kiev via Amsterdam on tourist visas.
The action followed a series of reports that mercenaries are planning to topple Madagascar’s newly elected President Marc Ravalomanana.
His administration is combatting supporters of former president Didier Ratsiraka, who has rejected the results of the election.
Ravalomanana earlier on Friday accused his arch-foe of sending mercenaries from South Africa by helicopter to assassinate him as African leaders gathered in Ethiopia to try to defuse a deepening six-month-old power feud on the Indian Ocean island.
In South Africa, however, air traffic authorities said no such takeoff had been recorded.
On Wednesday, after an alert by Paris, Tanzanian authorities intercepted 12 Madagascar-bound French mercenaries who had arrived in Dar es Salaam on a chartered plane, and sent them straight back to France. – Sapa-AFP