Military officials in Guinea-Bissau said they seized “total control” of the West African nation on Wednesday, arresting the president, closing borders and suspending the electoral process held last Sunday.
“Representing the senior leaderships of the different branches of Armed Forces, the High Military Command for the Restoration of the National Security and the Public Order has assumed full powers of Guinea Bissau,” General Diniz N'Tchama, head of the presidential military office, said in a statement read on state television.
“The High Military Command is responding to an ongoing plan to destabilize our country. For the implementation of this plan, an operation structure was created involving certain national politicians,” N'Tchama announced.
President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, who had been favored to win re-election in last Sunday's polls, was arrested and being held at general-staff headquarters where he was being “well-treated,” a military source told AFP.
A senior officer who also confirmed the arrest added that Embalo had been detained along “with the chief of staff and the minister of the interior.”
The coup happened after heavy gunfire rang out near the presidential palace earlier in the day, with men in military uniform taking over the main road leading to the building.
The military officers read the announcement at the Military Command headquarters in the capital, Bissau, AFP correspondents said.
Shortly before the officers' announcement, gunfire rang out near the electoral commission headquarters, presidential palace and interior ministry, witnesses said. It lasted for about an hour but appeared to have stopped by 1400 GMT, a Reuters journalist said.
“People are running everywhere,” said a driver in Bissau who asked not to be named, describing scenes of panic. There was no word yet of any casualties.
The electoral commission had been due on Thursday to announce provisional results from Sunday's election in which Embalo faced off against Fernando Dias, Embalo's top challenger in the election.
Both sides had claimed victory in the first round of voting.
Embalo was seeking to become the first president in three decades to win a second consecutive term in Guinea-Bissau.
A spokesperson for Embalo, Antonio Yaya Seidy, told Reuters that unidentified gunmen attacked the election commission to prevent an announcement of the vote results.
He said the men were affiliated with Dias, without providing evidence.
Former Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, who lost to Embalo in a contested runoff in 2019 and has backed Dias in this election, told Reuters that Dias had nothing to do with the incident.
Dias was meeting election observers when “some people erupted in the room to announce that there were gunshots in the center of the town,” said Pereira, who was in the same meeting and spoke to Reuters before security sources said he had been detained.
Former colonial power Portugal called for government institutions to resume normal operations and for vote counting and the proclamation of results to go ahead.
It said all those involved in the unrest should “refrain from any act of institutional or civic violence.”
Guinea-Bissau had been shaken by at least nine coups and attempted coups between 1974, when it gained independence from Portugal, and 2020, when Embalo took office.
The most recent reported coup attempt came in late October, when authorities announced that a group of senior officers had been arrested on suspicion of trying to topple the government.
