AL-MISTAPHA, ABACHA’S HIT-MAN GRANTED BAIL

Al-Mustapha in Court

The chief security officer to late president Sani Abacha, Major Hamza Al-Mustapha and 2 others have been granted bail by a federal high court in Lagos. Al-Mustapha has been standing trial since 1999 over allegations of murder and treasonable felony.   He was also charged with conspiring "among others still at large to overthrow the Federal Government of Nigeria," the court document said. Mustapha and two others were also charged with treason, which carries a possible death sentence.

The former Abacha hit-man was accused of disbursing money "for the purpose of purchasing a Stinger surface-to-air missile to be used in shooting down the president's helicopter with the president on board," the document added.   Al-Mustapha, one of the most powerful figures in the iron-fisted dictatorship of Abacha, was already in jail facing charges of attempted murder of a newspaper publisher in 1995 when the alleged offenses occurred.
The officers charged in absentia were Colonel Mohammed Ibn Umar Adeka, Commander Yakubu Kudambo and Lieutenant Tijani Abdallah, while the civilian was named Onwuchekwa Okorie.

The charge sheet said al-Mustapha funded several trips by Abdallah between November 2002 and March 2004 to Ivory Coast and Togo to acquire a missile for the attack.

"Commander Kudambo drafted the framework of a coup speech and the outlook of the intended government," the document said.

The coup charges against al-Mustapha have a curious historical symmetry because his late boss Abacha, whose mysterious death in 1998 opened the way for Obasanjo's election the following year, jailed Obasanjo on similar charges in 1995.

The Nigerian military has successfully overthrown the government six times since independence from Britain in 1960. There have been many more failed coups, and still more "phantom coup plots" used as a ruse to round up opponents of the government.

Obasanjo, who was a military ruler of Nigeria in the 1970s, returned to power in landmark elections in 1999, ending 15 years of military rule. He won a second term in a vote last year that observers said was marred by rigging and violence.

Obasanjo has been feted abroad for bringing democracy back to Nigeria and attempting to reform a corrupt and collapsing state. But his popularity has slumped at home because he has failed to lift living standards of the majority, who live on less than a dollar a day.

Speculation about a coup plot began in March when military intelligence officers stormed Kirikiri prison and took al-Mustapha for questioning. Prison sources said he had the run of the prison and masterminded an illicit business empire from the maximum-security jail on the Lagos waterfront.