The Gabonese government has said it has put down a coup attempt after a group of soldiers briefly took over state radio and broadcast a statement calling on people to “rise up” while the president, Ali Bongo, was in Morocco recovering from a stroke.
The message was read at 4.30am (0530 GMT) on Monday at the state television headquarters in Libreville and simultaneously filmed for social media.
Shots were heard in the same area of the capital at about the same time as a young man identifying himself as Lt Kelly Ondo Obiang and the deputy commander of the Republican Guard, as well as the head of a group called the Patriotic Youth Movement of the Gabonese Defence and Security Forces, began to read the message.
“The government is in place. The institutions are in place,” the government spokesman Guy-Bertrand Mapangou later told France 24. Four plotters had been arrested and a fifth who fled was being searched for, he said.
The communications minister said the men were “a group of jokers and the military hierarchy does not recognise them”.
The Bongo family has ruled Gabon since 1967, except for four months in 2009 after Ali Bongo’s father, Omar, died.
Obiang was flanked by two armed men, all in the uniform and green berets of the powerful Republican Guard, which is usually tasked with protecting the president, as he read out the message on radio.
“The eagerly awaited day has arrived when the army has decided to put itself on the side of the people in order to save Gabon from chaos,” he said. “If you are eating, stop; if you are having a drink, stop; if you are sleeping, wake up. Wake up your neighbours … rise up as one and take control of the street,” he added, calling on Gabonese to occupy the country’s airports, public buildings and media organisations.
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