Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Sissoco Embalo said on Thursday that three people previously arrested by U.S. authorities for drug trafficking were behind an attempted coup last week.
Former navy admiral Bubo Na Tchuto and his aides Tchamy Yala and Papis Djeme were arrested in 2013 in a high-profile U.S. drug sting on a luxury yacht for conspiring to facilitate the shipment of cocaine to the United States.
Embalo told reporters that he saw Yala and Djeme himself during the coup attempt and that Na Tchuto was not present but was also behind the plot.
He also said that among those involved were the same people who killed former president João Bernardo Vieira in 2009, and that rebels from Senegal’s Casamance region were also involved.
Embalo was leading a cabinet meeting on February 1 when armed men stormed the compound in what he described as a well-funded and tightly planned assassination attempt. Eleven people ended up dead, mostly among the government’s security team.
Guinea-Bissau has seen around 10 successful or failed coups since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974. It is a major transit point for Latin American cocaine headed for Europe, which has contributed to its instability.
