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BISSAU (Reuters) -A group of army officers said they had seized power in coup-prone Guinea-Bissau on Wednesday, a day before the planned announcement of results from a hotly contested presidential election.
In a statement read on state television by spokesperson Diniz N'Tchama, the army officers said they had ousted President Umaro Sissoco Embalo, suspended the electoral process, shut borders and would enforce a curfew.
Shortly after, Embalo told France 24 TV: "I have been deposed."
The army officers said in their statement that they had formed "The High Military Command for the Restoration of Order" and would be in charge of the West African nation until further notice.
The officers did not specify if they had taken Embalo into custody. Two security sources told Reuters that he was being held at the office of the army chief of staff.
In a video statement distributed by his campaign late Wednesday, Fernando Dias, Embalo's top challenger in the election, said he was free and in a safe place after armed men tried to take him into custody.
Dias said former Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, who Embalo defeated in the 2019 election, had been detained.
"We have been the target of a false coup attempt for the simple reason that I won the elections... This is a simulation," he said.
The African Union and West African regional bloc ECOWAS, in a joint statement on Wednesday night expressing "deep concern" over the coup announcement, said officials in charge of the electoral process had also been arrested and called for their immediate release.
It was the latest outbreak of unrest in Guinea-Bissau, a small coastal nation situated between Senegal and Guinea that is a notorious hub for cocaine bound for Europe.
It was not immediately clear whether the army had the support of all of Guinea-Bissau's fractious armed forces or whether they were in control of all of the country of around 2 million people.
The army statement said the officers' decision to take power came in response to a destabilisation plan concocted by "certain national politicians" and "well-known national and foreign drug barons", as well as an attempt to manipulate the election results.
GUNFIRE IN THE CAPITAL BEFORE ANNOUNCEMENT
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 U.S. mission to Guinea-Bissau issued a security advisory on Wednesday saying there were military checkpoints throughout Bissau and that security forces had deployed tear gas.
"A continuation of the sporadic gunfire that was reported earlier in the day in Bissau cannot be ruled out," the advisory said.
The electoral commission had been due on Thursday to announce provisional results from Sunday's election in which Embalo faced off against Dias.
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.
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 centre 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."
LONG HISTORY OF COUPS
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.
Embalo has said he has survived three coup attempts during his time in office. His critics have accused him of manufacturing crises as an excuse for crackdowns.
Gunfire rang out for hours in the capital in December 2023 in what Embalo's government said was an attempted putsch. Embalo dissolved parliament in response, and the country has been without a functioning legislature ever since.
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.
The lead-up to Sunday's vote was fraught, with the opposition arguing that Embalo has already overstayed his term.
Under Embalo, the cocaine trade appeared to be booming, with an August report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime describing it as potentially more profitable than ever before.
In September last year, the judicial police announced they had seized 2.63 metric tons of cocaine from a plane that landed in Bissau from Venezuela.
(Reporting by Alberto DaboAdditional reporting by Ayen Deng Bior, Bate Felix, Ngouda Dioneand Robbie Corey-BouletWriting by Robbie Corey-BouletEditing by Alex Richardson, Ros Russell, Frances Kerry and Diane Craft)
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