President Conde arrested as Guinean officers stage coup

Guinea’s President Alpha Conde has been arrested by the country’s Special Forces who staged a coup d’etat on Sunday, saying the have captured the President who in currently in detention in an undisclosed location.

The leader of the the Coup d’etat, Col. Mamady Doumbouya, a former head of the country’s special forces, said the 83-year-old President Condé was in custody following hours of gunfire in the capital, Conakry, and warnings for people to stay indoors.

Also Read: J.J Rawlings: A Man Of His People

Doumniuya, while announcing the coup in a video, said that the government and the country’s constitution and institutions have been ‘dissolved’.

“We have decided after having taken the president, who is currently with us, to dissolve the current constitution, to dissolve the institutions; we have also decided to dissolve the government and the closure of land and air borders.

“The personalization of political life is over. We will no longer entrust politics to one man, we will entrust it to the people,” Doumbouya said.

Doumbouya said he was acting in the best interests of the nation of over 12.7 million people.

“The duty of a soldier is to save the country,” he said.

Heavy gunfire had earlier broken out near the presidential palace in the capital Conakry on Sunday morning, with several sources saying an elite national army unit led by a former French legionnaire, Mamady Doumbouya, was behind the unrest.

In the video which was also widely circulated on social networks but has not been broadcast on national television, the coup plotters President Conde is being treated with dignity as no soldier has the authority to mistreat him.

Beaming the video on the President Conde, one of the soldiers asked him if he has been mistreated, but Conde who was, in jeans and a shirt on a sofa, refused to answer them.

But the country’s Ministry of Defense, in a statement, said that “the insurgents (had) spread fear” in Conakry before taking the direction of the presidential palace, but that “the presidential guard, supported by the defense and security forces, loyalists and republicans, have contained the threat and pushed back the group of attackers.”