EQUATORIAL GUINEA: Exiled leader resurfaces saying hit men spared his life

DAKAR, 3 May 2005 (IRIN) - Severo Moto, the leader of Equatorial Guinea’s self-styled government-in-exile, has resurfaced in Spain after being reported missing and has said he miraculously escaped an assassination bid.

Moto reappeared in Madrid last weekend, more than 10 days after his wife reported him missing, saying a pair of would-be hit men had taken him out on a yacht in Croatian waters to kill him, but suddenly changed their minds, apparently because he was a fellow Catholic.

At a weekend press conference in Madrid, Moto said that he had twice gone to Croatia to seek funding for his political campaign against President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled oil-rich Equatorial Guinea for more than a quarter of a century.

But, he said, he had been betrayed and was to have been thrown overboard in the Adriatic until “the assassins turned into angels."

He quoted them as saying shortly before they turned the boat back towards the southern Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik: “We brought you here to kill you but we aren’t murderers. You are a man of God.”

Moto, a former political prisoner in Equatorial Guinea, heads a self-styled government in exile in Madrid. His dissident cabinet had suggested that Obiang's government was involved in his disappearance. Malabo denied the accusation.

A member of the opposition told IRIN on Tuesday that Moto had denied earlier reports that Spain, where he lives as a political refugee, was behind the plot to do away with him.

There was no comment from the Spanish foreign ministry, who earlier this month said it was investigating the reports of his disappearance.

Moto and eight other members of the government in exile were convicted in absentia last year after being accused of masterminding a failed plot to depose Obiang with the help of mercenaries flown into the oil-rich Central African country from South Africa.

Moto was sentenced to 63 years in jail in November -- the third time that a court in Equatorial Guinea had convicted him of political offences.

According to prosecution evidence presented at the trial, the coup attempt was financed by a group of overseas businessmen, including Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher was subsequently fined by a South African court after admitting that he supplied a helicopter which was due to be used in the venture.

Obiang, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea for 26 years since deposing and killing his uncle in 1979, has been widely accused of human rights abuse and of corruption involving oil revenues that have poured in over the past decade.

Equatorial Guinea produces 350,000 barrels per day of oil and has become Africa’s third-biggest oil producer after Nigeria and Angola, but most of its 500,000 people still live in dire poverty.

[ENDS]