President Thabo Mbeki said on Sunday the court proceedings of eight South Africans detained in Equatorial Guinea on charges of plotting a coup d’etat was a domestic issue which the west African country must deal with itself.
”As far as the court case is concerned it is a domestic matter and they must deal with the issue,” Mbeki said, speaking on a SABC2 on Sunday night.
He added: ”… but certainly we are very keen to see that nobody gets ill treated, abused and that the legal process must be indeed a genuine legal process that people don’t get convicted wrongly,” he said.
He said when the men were first arrested in March a delegation from Equatorial Guinea had visited South Africa to ask, ”that the South African government should give them whatever support that they need to make sure that they have proper legal process and proper detention, no abuse of people during interrogation and all of that, and sure, we agreed”.
The delegation had also told the government that they had ”sufficient information to say these people were planning to remove the government of Equatorial Guinea by force, but they wanted to do that in open court, they wanted to do that in a transparent manner,” Mbeki said.
The detainees are among a group of 15 men accused of planning to overthrow Equatorial Guinea’s leader Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
They include Angolans, Armenians and South Africans, some of Angolan origin. There was also a German who died after ”an attack of cerebral malaria” according to the authorities. – Sapa