Ex-SAS man deported to Equatorial Guinea
By Peta Thornycroft in Johannesburg
Last Updated: 10:59am GMT 01/02/2008
A former SAS officer has been deported from Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea to face charges of plotting against the country’s president.
Simon Mann [centre] handcuffed after being held in Harare, Zimbabwe’s maximum security prison
Simon Mann was transferred in secret to the oil-rich dictatorship on Wednesday night, before his ultimately unsucessful appeal against the move was completed, according to his lawyer Jonathan Samkange.
The Old Etonian is accused of recruiting mercenaries to overthrow president Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
“They deported him at night, late Wednesday night. There are affidavits to that effect,” said Mr Samkange, who did not learn about his client’s deportation until he tried to visit him yesterday.
“The idea was that by the time we filed a notice of appeal he would have gone. This was designed to defeat the notice of our appeal.
“Deporting a person at night is not only mischievous but unlawful.”
Mann was jailed in Zimbabwe in 2004 when 67 mercenaries arrived in Harare on a Boeing 727, allegedly en route to Equatorial Guinea. Mann, who met the group at Harare airport, served four years for trying to buy illegal weapons, allegedly for the operation.
Havinf been deported, Mann is likely to be consigned to Black Beach Prison in the capital, Malabo.
In 2005, Amnesty International reported that inmates in Black Beach were in danger of starving to death, surviving on daily rations of a cup of rice and one or two bread rolls. Some prisoners had routinely gone without food for up to six days. A new wing has been built and the authorities say that conditions have improved but Equatorial Guinea has one of Africa’s worst human rights records. Mann’s appeal against extradition was dismissed on the day that Equatorial Guinea withdrew an invitation to Manfred Nowak, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, who had been invited to gather “first-hand information” about detention facilities. The regime has, however, pledged to refrain from executing Mann.
The alleged plot to overthrow President Nguema and replace him with Severo Moto, an opposition leader living in exile in Spain, involved a remarkable array of characters and was compared at the time to the 1978 Roger Moore film The Wild Geese about a group of mercenaries in Africa.
>Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former Prime Minister, was a friend of Mann, who lived near him in Cape Town. Thatcher was convicted under South Africa’s anti-mercenary laws after he admitted hiring a helicopter for Mann which would have been used in the alleged plot.
So far, Mann’s prison years have been spent in relatively benign conditions. In Zimbabwe, he enjoyed a single cell and his lawyers brought him books.
Mann has seven children in Britain, including two sons serving in the Army. His youngest child, a boy, was born after his arrest. His second wife, Amanda, lives on the family estate in Hampshire. Those who have known Mann describe him as poker-faced, mysterious and secretive. Yet he emerged into the limelight in 2002 to play a British officer in a documentary film about the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland.
