Feb 1, 2008, 14:27 GMT
Johannesburg/Harare - Alleged British mercenary Simon Mann was secretly extradited in the early hours of Thursday from Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea where he faces charges of attempting to overthrow the government, his lawyers said in Harare Friday.
He was flown to the West African country in a Zimbabwe Air Force airplane after have been collected from Zimbabwe's Chikurubi prison after midnight on Wednesday just hours after he lost a High Court appeal to prevent his extradition.
Prosecutors in Equatorial Guinea suspect the old Etonian and former British Special Air Services officer of leading a plot in 2004 to overthrow the government of Teodoro Obian Nguema that failed when authorities in Zimbabwe intervened.
'He was abducted,' Mann's lawyer Jonathan Samkange said Friday. 'It was arranged before the court sat on Wednesday.'
The lawyer went to Chikurubi prison on Thursday midday to brief Mann about plans for an appeal to the Supreme Court after Wednesday's High Court decision.
But Samkange was told the 55-year-old former business associate of Mark Thatcher, controversial son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was no longer there.
Samkange immediately launched a habeas corpus application for the Zimbabwe government to produce Mann, but only learnt Friday morning from a series of affidavits from police and the attorney general's office that Mann was by then in the Guinean capital Malabo.
'An affidavit from a police superintendent of the notorious Law and Order Section said they arrived at Chikurubi to collect Mann at 1:20 am on Thursday. He first refused to accompany the officers. So they lied to him,' said Samkange.
'They told him that where they were going, he could telephone me.'
'He was taken to Manyame Air Base just south of Harare and the aircraft left with him for Malabo at 6:20 am. I applied for him to be produced, but they said he had already gone to Equatorial Guinea.
'All day yesterday (Thursday) I was looking for him and they said nothing. I was not advised. They didn't inform the British embassy. He was not allowed to communicate with his lawyer.'
Attorney General Bharat Patel, who was also one of two judges who ruled against Mann's appeal on Wednesday, had reportedly hours later notified police that Mann could be deported.
Mann's lawyers, who had immediately began to arrange his Supreme Court appeal, said his extradition comes ahead of the finalization of his case and is therefore illegal.
Patel was aware Mann was appealing to the supreme court and had given lawyers an undertaking that Mann would be given seven days notice before he was extradited, Samkange said.
'It was obviously politically guided. I can only conclude that someone was pulling strings here,' he said.
Mann had also asked for the High Court ruling to be stayed because Patel, acting essentially both as judge and prosecutor, could not be expected to deliver a fair decision. 'This is exactly why we wanted the ruling held over,' said Samkange.
'His (Mann's) rights have been severely abused. I am furious, but I am also ashamed that our government should resort to tactics like this.
Nguema wants Mann to face trial and accuses him of planning to fly in a force of 70 special forces veterans in a hired Antonov aircraft and seize power in a military strike.
However, the plot fell apart in Harare when Mann and the other 70 men were arrested at the airport where they had stopped to load a consignment of firearms. In September 2004 they were sentenced to a variety of prison terms for weapons, aviation and immigration offences.
Mann was jailed in Zimbabwe for four years.
On the day he completed his sentence and was about to be released, he was brought before a magistrate for extradition to Equatorial Guinea, which has been under the one-party dictatorship of Nguema, who came to power in a coup against his uncle in 1979, and had his uncle executed.
Samkange was back in the High Court on Friday with an urgent application for authorities to produce him Mann back in Zimbabwe. This was illegal. The government of Equatorial Guinea has no right, no jurisdiction over him.
'I will not stop,' he said. 'I will go on to the African Human Rights Court and to the International Court of Justice.'
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