Guinean President Joao Bernardo Vieira has reassured residents of Guinea-Bissau by news conference from his bullet-scarred home after mutinous soldiers fought their way into the residence in a three-hour gun battle with his guards.
In an apparent coup attempt, the soldiers attacked Vieira’s home on Sunday with heavy artillery fire shortly after midnight, killing at least one of his guards and injuring several others before security forces were able to push them back, Guinean Interior Minister Cipriano Cassama said earlier. The attackers did not reach the room where Vieira was hiding and neither he nor his wife were hurt, Cassama said.
“These people attacked my residence with a single objective — to physically liquidate me,” Vieira told the nation in a late afternoon televised news conference. “No one has the right to massacre the people of Guinea-Bissau in order to steal power by means of the gun.”
PHOTO: EPA
The walls of his fortified house were scarred with bullets and its floors were still littered with shell casings.
But calm appeared to have returned to the capital, Bissau, and Vieira assured citizens that “the situation is under control.”
Guinea-Bissau has had multiple coups and attempted coups since 1980, when Vieira himself first took power in one.
The UN says impoverished Guinea-Bissau, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, is a key transit point for cocaine smuggled from Latin America to Europe.
In parliamentary elections held a week ago, opposition leader and former Guinean president Kumba Yala accused Vieira of being the country’s top drug trafficker. Vieira did not respond to the accusation.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade ordered troops to the border with Guinea-Bissau on Sunday after receiving a panicked phone call from Vieira in the night, Wade’s spokesman El Hadj Amadou Sall said.
“The troops will stay at the border until we are sure the situation has stabilized,” Sall said.
The African Union (AU) quickly condemned the attack.
The AU rejects “any unconstitutional change of government and condemns in advance any attempt to seize power by force,” AU commission chairman Jean Ping said in a statement.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack, his spokesman said.
Ban noted “with great concern reports of the alleged involvement of elements of the Armed Forces of Guinea-Bissau in the attack, and calls upon them to refrain from any measures that could further destabilize the country,” the spokesman said in a statement.
The UN secretary-general’s representative in Guinea-Bissau, Shola Omoregie, told reporters that the international community condemned the attack.
“It’s unacceptable that after legitimate elections they could attack the president and try to kill him,” he said.
His comments were echoed by Carlos Gomes, a former prime minister who now heads the majority party: “It’s unacceptable in the 21st century to resolve our problems with violence.”
Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, has a history of coups and misrule.
Vieira initially seized power in a 1980 coup. He was pushed out in 1998 during a brief civil war. In 2000, Yala won the presidential election, ruling until 2003, when he was forced from power in a coup. Vieira won the 2005 presidential election and has ruled since then.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS