Zimbabwean authorities said 64 men on a plane seized Sunday at the airport in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, were mercenaries on their way to sow conflict in Equatorial Guinea, and threatened to execute them.
The Herald, Zimbabwe's state-owned newspaper, reported that 20 of the men were South Africans. There were also 23 Angolans, 18 Namibians and two Congolese, the newspaper reported, and one Zimbabwean with a South African passport.
The president of Equatorial Guinea, a county whose recent oil discoveries have made it one of the continent's biggest oil producers, said the group was part of a quest by "enemy powers" to overthrow his government. The president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, said South Africa and Angola had alerted him to the plot, in which countries and multinational companies hostile to his 23-year rule had conspired to replace him with a politician now living in exile in Spain.
An executive with the company that operated the plane, an aging Boeing 727, said it had been engaged to transport security guards hired by mining companies to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"It is all a dreadful misunderstanding," Charles Burrows, a senior executive for the company, Logo Logistics Ltd, told South African reporters.
But Obiang said that confirmation of the plot had come from questioning about 15 people -- seven of them South Africans -- arrested Monday in his country and accused of conspiring to stage a coup.
"In the course of questioning, we have found that they were financed by enemy powers, by multinational companies, by countries that do not love us," the president said in a speech broadcast Tuesday on state radio and television.
Without naming them, Obiang said certain countries knew of the coup attempt but did nothing and would be considered enemies.
"Multinational firms operating here and outside who contributed to this operation are also enemy companies," Obiang said.
Vast oil reserves have been discovered in Equatorial Guinea, a country the size of Maryland with about 500,000 people, and it has become the third-biggest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola. Exxon Mobil pumps the most oil there, followed by a long list of multinational companies.
The South African minister of foreign affairs, Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma, said her department was in no hurry to help either the 20 South Africans detained in Zimbabwe or the seven arrested in Equatorial Guinea.
She told South African reporters that "there was a link between the plane and Equatorial Guinea" and that one man arrested in Equatorial Guinea had "spilled the beans."
"They are not exactly innocent travelers finding themselves in a difficult situation," she said, adding, "We don't like the idea that South Africa has become a cesspool of mercenaries."
The plane belonged to a small aviation company in Kansas until last week, when, an executive of the company said, it was sold. South African aviation officials said the plane landed at a small domestic airport near the capital, Pretoria, on Sunday morning, and took on the 64 passengers and a three-member crew.
The men in Zimbabwean custody were to appear in court in Harare yesterday or today, The Herald reported. "They are going to face the severest punishment available in our statutes, including capital punishment," the Zimbabwean foreign minister, Stan Mudenge, said at a news briefing in Harare.
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