Equatorial Guinea this week accused Spain of trying to overthrow its government in an alleged plot by foreign mercenaries to kill the president.
In an interview with The Guardian, President Teodoro Obiang’s special adviser, Miguel Mifuno, accused Madrid of sending a warship to the country with 500 marines on board.
He alleged that they were to have been sent in to secure the capital after mercenaries killed the president and ministers.
”Our intelligence sources say that the warship was going to arrive on the same date that the coup attempt was going to take place — March 8,” he said. ”It was already in our territorial waters with 500 soldiers aboard. Meanwhile, there was a team of foreign mercenaries already in Equatorial Guinea who knew where we lived. They had plans to kill 50 people and to arrest others. Spain was providing all the facilities for the coup. [The boat] was there to provide resources for the mercenaries.”
Mifuno also alleged that Spain was funding opposition groups in exile: ”Spain wants to decide who runs its former colony. Many countries knew the coup was going to happen, including the United States and several … West African countries.”
The trial of 17 alleged mercenaries arrested in Guinea, including German and South African nationals, is expected to begin in Malabo within four weeks. A further 70 alleged mercenaries, who were also detained in March, face trial in Zimbabwe, accused of plotting to buy arms and planning to join the supposed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.
Lucie Bourthemieux, the Paris-based legal adviser to Equatorial Guineas’s minister of justice, alleged that Spain had twice offered to send arms to the country just before the coup attempt, ostensibly to help it with a longstanding border dispute with Gabon.
A spokesperson for the Spanish Foreign Ministry in Madrid denied that Spain had had anything to do with the alleged coup attempt. ”There was no ship there,” she said. ”We deny any kind of implication in an attempted coup.” — Â