Security agencies probe suspected coup plot

Nigerian security agencies are investigating several military officers and civilians on suspicion of “serious security breaches”, the president’s office said on Friday, following media reports that a plot to topple the government had been uncovered. President Olusegun Obasanjo’s spokeswoman, Remi Oyo, told reporters in the capital Abuja that she would not call what was being investigated a coup plot, but confirmed there had been a possible threat to national security. “It's true that the…national and military security agencies are investigating what looks like a serious breach of security on the part of some military officers and apparent civilian collaborators,” Oyo told reporters. "But it remains an investigation of an allegation and the intelligence community is just doing its job,” she added. Nigeria emerged from 15 years of successive military government in 1999 with the election of Obasanjo, himself a former military leader. The first whiff of trouble came on Wednesday, when the Vanguard newspaper reported that at least 28 military officers had been hauled in for questioning on suspicion of recruiting soldiers for an insurrection “along religious ethnic and religious lines”. The report said the officers had sought the support of soldiers who felt disaffected with Obasanjo’s government over unpaid salaries, general insecurity, corruption and malpractices in last year’s elections. Army sources told IRIN that some of those questioned by the security services named Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, a former head of personal security for the late military strongman Sani Abacha, as the mastermind of the plan. Members of Al-Mustapha’s family said in a statement issued on Tuesday, that the Major had been shot in the leg while being moved overnight from Kirikiri maximum security prison in Lagos by men from the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI). Al-Mustapha, who had allegedly been given ‘a licence to kill’ by his former boss Abacha, had been under remand for murder. But a statement from the State Security Services denied that Al-Mustapha had been wounded. They said he remained with the DMI, who were seeking “clarification of some security matters”. “We want to state categorically that there is no iota of truth to the effect that Al-Mustapha was abducted and shot in the leg in the early hours of 31 March, 2004,” the statement said. Al-Mustapha had been held in custody since 1999 for a number of crimes committed between 1993 and 1998 when Abacha was in power. They include the 1996 assassination of Kudirat Abiola, wife of Moshood Abiola - Abacha’s main political opponent who won 1993 elections that were annulled by the military. Al-Mustapha is also accused of the attempted murder of Guardian newspaper publisher Alex Ibru in the same year. Abacha died of apparent heart failure in June 1998. A month later Abiola died of similar causes while in detention. The death of the two men cleared the way for reform under Abacha’s successor Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar that culminated in the elections of 1999 that brought Obasanjo to power. Oil-rich Nigeria has been ruled for 29 out of its 43 years as an independent state by soldiers who took power from elected civilians. There have been six successful military takeovers in the country’s history and several failed ones for which hundreds of soldiers found culpable were executed by firing squad.