British coup-plotter freed in Equatorial Guinea

AP - By MICHELLE FAUL

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Equatorial Guinea freed a British coup-plotter and four South African mercenaries Tuesday after a presidential pardon for their foreign-bankrolled conspiracy to overthrow the government and take over the country's oil riches.

In a spectacular trial last year, Simon Mann testified that U.S. and European governments knew of the plan in advance and welcomed it as did international oil companies operating in the Central African nation, which is the continent's No. 3 oil producer.

His testimony also implicated the son of former British Premier Margaret Thatcher as chief bankroller, which Mark Thatcher denied.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose Obono Olo told The Associated Press Tuesday that President Teodoro Obiang Nguema had granted the five men full pardons for the 2004 coup plot. Information Minister Geronimo Osa said they will never be allowed to return to the country.

Obono, who was the attorney general who prosecuted the coup plotters, denied rumors that Mann was unwell and that any pressure had been brought by foreign governments.

But a statement on the Ministry of Information Web site noted that Mann and the others were being freed "with the hope that the accused return to their families and receive appropriate medical treatment according to their age and health." It said the Ministry of Justice, Culture and Prisons proposed the pardon to the president, who granted "compassionate forgiveness."

The two officials spoke in telephone interviews from Malabo, Equatorial Guinea's steamy island capital off Africa's west coast, where Frederick Forsythe three decades ago wrote up a similar plot as "Dogs of War," later made into a movie starring Christopher Walken.

In the book, a ragtag troop of mercenaries is recruited by British elite to seize control of an African backwater rich in platinum at the height of the Cold War.

Equatorial Guinea's president has said that the real-life plan was to set up a puppet government under exiled opposition leader Severo Moto, with the coup financiers controlling contracts to the country's oil wealth.

"Dogs of War" ends in disaster for the adventurers, with their plot collapsing and the mercenaries killed.

Mann apparently can look to a happier ending that was not foreseen when he was sentenced in 2008 to more than 34 years in Malabo's Black Beach Prison, notorious for torture, unexplained deaths of inmates, a lack of food and much disease. At the time, Amnesty International said prisoners there are condemned to "a slow, lingering death sentence."