Equatorial Guinea officials to question Mark Thatcher, probe Armenian company over coup

Agence France Presse
Sept 4 2004

MALABO : A team of state prosecutors from Equatorial Guinea was to
leave Malabo for South Africa to question Mark Thatcher over his
alleged involvement in a complex bid to oust President Teodoro Obiang
Nguema, a government source said.

Another legal team from the tiny, oil-rich country on Africa’s west
coast was in Armenia to probe links between a local air transport
company and the same alleged coup plot, a judicial official said
Saturday.

Thatcher, 51, the millionaire son of former British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher, was arrested in a dawn raid on his luxury Cape
Town home on August 25 and charged with bankrolling a plot involving
mercenaries to oust Obiang, in power in Equatorial Guinea since 1979.

“A delegation from the public ministry led by Attorney General Jose Olo
Obono will on Saturday travel to South Africa” to question Thatcher,
said the source, who asked not to be named.

Government officials in Malabo last week told AFP that Malabo and
Pretoria were discussing the possibility of Equato-Guinean officials
interviewing Thatcher in South Africa.

Nineteen people accused of plotting to topple Obiang have been on trial
in Malabo since last month. Their trial was suspended indefinitely
on Tuesday to take into account new developments including the arrest
of Margaret Thatcher’s son in South Africa.

On August 27, a court in Zimbabwe absolved most of the 70 men on
trial there over the same alleged plot.

Press reports have implicated an international network of wealthy
businessmen in the alleged plot to oust Obiang, in exchange for which
they would be given a slice of Equatorial Guinea’s oil riches.

Thatcher is due in court in South Africa on November 25 to answer
charges he contributed 275,000 dollars (230,000 euros) to the plot,
whose alleged mastermind, Briton Simon Mann, is a friend and neighbour
in the plush Cape Town suburb of Constantia.

Mann, founder of the defunct mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes, was
found guilty of attempting to illegally purchase weapons in a Zimbabwe
court last week in connection with the conspiracy in Equatorial Guinea.

Meanwhile, the suspected leader of the 19 would-be coup makers on
trial in Malabo, South African businessman Nick du Toit — a former
business partner of Mann’s — has told a court here that he met with
Thatcher, but insisted their meeting was strictly business-related.

The focus of the Equato-Guinean investigators’ visit to Armenia
was a contract between the central Asian country’s Tiger Air and a
German company whose representative in Malabo, Gerhard Eugen Merz,
was among 15 foreigners arrested in Equatorial Guinea in March and
accused of plotting the coup, a legal official said here.

Merz died days after his arrest, officially from cerebral malaria,
but with rights groups saying he was tortured to death.

Among those arrested were the six Armenian air crew of an Antonov
cargo plane. All six have denied involvement in the alleged coup bid,
and told a court in Malabo that they had come to Equatorial Guinea to
work under contract to Merz’s company, which had leased their plane
and services.

The Antonov and its Armenian crew arrived in Equatorial Guinea in
January this year.

Between then and the discovery of the alleged coup plot in March
they made only one flight, on behalf of a company owned by du Toit,
who faces the death penalty for allegedly leading the coup bid.