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Guinea arrests allies of ex-junta chief

AFP — April 3, 2010

Conakry — Soldiers close to Guinea's former junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara have been arrested for inciting a mutiny in an army training camp, a military source said Saturday.

Dadis Camara's nephew Lieutenant Marcel Guilavogui, former deputy commander of the presidential guard, was among those arrested Thursday along with three other officers and an unknown number of sub-officers.

“They were placed under arrest for inciting rebellion in the barracks of student soldiers in Kaleya near Forecariah,” 110 kilometres (70 miles) south of the capital Conakry, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Many army trainees loyal to Camara face expulsion after the former junta boss was ousted following an assassination bid in December, the source said.

“The arrested soldiers incited the fighters to rebel and demand they be kept in training at the Kaleya camp,” he said.

The trainees detained their commander before embarking on acts of vandalism on the road from Conakry to Forecariah, the military source said.

“They blocked cars and robbed passengers before entering the centre of Forecariah and firing shots in the air in broad daylight.”

An elite unit of soldiers and police were sent from Conakry to restore order, arresting several trainees.

Under Camara's rule fighters from southern Guinea, drawn from the same ethnic group as him, were recruited as presidential guard trainees to boost the ranks of his loyalists in the army.

Non-governmental organisations accuse Camara's camp of using these trainees to carry out a bloody crackdown on an opposition rally in September 2009 in which more than 150 people were shot dead.

But under the junta chief's successor, interim President Sekouba Konate, Camara loyalists are now required to meet certain criteria in order to stay in training.

“Some were expelled as they did not fulfil certain requirements, particularly medical, to be recruited into the Guinean army,” the source said.

Guinea, one of the world's top bauxite producers, has been mired in a political crisis sparked by a military coup led by Camara in December 2008 a week after the death of President Lansana Conte.

Camara is recuperating in Burkina Faso after being shot in the head by an aide-de-camp last December, in what some said was linked to a dispute over the September 2009 massacre.

A UN report on the massacre in Guinea's capital Conakry, in which hundreds were wounded and women and young girls raped, named Camara as a suspect and accused the army of “crimes against humanity.”

The country is currently being led by a transitional government which will chart the path to elections on June 27, set to be the first democratic poll in the west African nation since independence in 1958.

The incident comes ahead of a visit by Konate to former colonial power France on Wednesday.