Gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying Togo's national soccer squad to the top African tournament in Angola on Friday, killing the driver and wounding nine others, including two players, a Togo team official said. Togo captain Emmanuel Adebayor, who was on the bus but escaped unharmed, said his team might quit the African Nations Cup, where some of soccer's most valuable stars are due to play.
The bus had just entered the Angolan enclave of Cabinda, where separatists have waged a three-decade long war, when it came under heavy gunfire for several minutes, the team official said. An Angolan minister called the attack in Cabinda, which produces most of Angola's oil, an "act of terrorism". A separatist group, the Front for the Liberation of Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) claimed responsibility for the attack, which happened two days before the start of the 2010 African Nations Cup, Africa's most-followed sporting event. "This operation is just the start of a series of planned actions that will continue to take place in the whole territory of Cabinda," said the statement seen by Reuters and signed by FLEC's secretary general Rodrigues Mingas. In a statement published on state-owned news agency Angop, the Angolan government said: "The FLEC group that carried out this terrorist action came from the Republic of Congo and that is where it returned to after completing this action."
Cabinda is a small enclave separated from the rest of Angola by a strip of land belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The roots of the conflict between the government and FLEC are deep but one of the main grievances is that Cabindans see few benefits from the oil produced from their land.
Source: mail & Guardian
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