Two killed as army repels assault on barracks

A group of unidentified men attacked an army barracks in Mansoa, 60 km east of the capital Bissau, before dawn on Friday in an apparent attempt to seize control of its armoury, residents in the town said. The attackers were beaten off after a three-hour exchange of heavy gunfire. Father Davide Sciocco, the parish priest in Mansoa, told the Portuguese radio station TSF that two of the attackers were killed in the fighting. The Portuguese news agency Lusa quoted military sources in Guinea-Bissau, as saying the group appeared to be led by an associate of the late army general Ansumane Mane. Mane led a rebellion against former president Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira in 1998 that plunged Guinea-Bissau into a year-long civil war. He was killed in November 2000 while leading a failed coup attempt against elected president Kumba Yala. Kumba Yala was eventually deposed by a military coup on 14 September this year. The assault on Mansoa barracks is bound to heighten tension in this desperately poor country of 1.3 million people at a time when the honeymoon between the military junta, led by General Verissimo Correia Seabra, and civilian political leaders who initially welcomed the coup, is starting to go sour. The leaders of 17 political parties invited by the junta to discuss the formation of a civilian government to lead this former Portuguese colony to fresh elections, broadly welcomed the army's choice of respected businessman Henrique Pereira Rosa as interim president. But 15 of the 17 parties rejected the junta's choice of Antonio Artur Sanha, the secretary general of Kumba Yala's Social Renovation Party (PRS) as prime minister of a broad-based coalition government. Several threatened to withdraw their cooperation with the junta after it refused to reconsider his appointment. Although Sanha had been a critic of the erratic and unpredictable former president Yala, most political leaders had wanted an independent figure to fill the post. Sanha, who belongs to the large Balante ethnic group, to which most senior army officers belong, was chosen by a majority vote of the 25-member junta on Tuesday. The junta has not yet set a timetable for a return to constitutional rule, which is expected to take up to two years. An ad-hoc commission of political leaders and military officers chaired by Jose Camnate Na Bissign, the Roman Catholic bishop of Bissau, recommended last week that parliamentary elections should be held in six months time and presidential elections a year later.