World News : Bissau soldiers attack home of poll front-runner

BISSAU (World News) - Soldiers in Guinea-Bissau's capital firing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades on Thursday attacked the residence of former Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior, the front-runner in a presidential election, witnesses said.

Diplomatic and political sources said the evening attack in the small West African state appeared aimed at derailing the unfinished election. Gomes Junior, candidate for the ruling PAIGC party, won close to an outright majority in last month's first round of voting in the poor former Portuguese colony, which has a history of coups and barracks revolts.

A second-round run-off had been set for April 29.

The whereabouts of Gomes Junior, who was known to be unpopular with some members of the military because of his support for downsizing and reforming the bloated army, were not immediately known.

Rumors circulating among some Bissau residents that he had been killed in the attack, which set at least one house on fire, could not be confirmed.

After the gunfire and explosions, armed soldiers stopped jou rnalists from approaching the residence of Gomes Junior, which is located almost opposite the Angolan embassy.

Soldiers also blocked the main roads in and out of the crumbling coastal capital, one witness said.

The gunfire later subsided, but frightened government officials and residents kept to their houses.

One political source, who asked not be named, said soldiers had arrested the country's interim president, Raimundo Pereira, a former parliament speaker who is also a PAIGC member.

"There is some trouble. We don't know what it is. There is shooting, sporadic machine-gun fire and there have been three loud bangs. ... We hear it is coming from near Carlos Gomes Junior's house," a diplomat in the capital, Bissau, told World News.

State television and radio and private radios had all stopped broadcasting.

The country, whose weak governance has made it a haven for Latin American drug cartels transshipping cocaine to Europe, is electing a president to replace Malam Bacai Sanha, who died in a Paris hospital in January after a long illness.

Gomes Junior was due to contest the run-off this month, but his second-round rival, Kumba Yala, had said he would boycott the vote over alleged first-round rigging.

Only hours before the shooting, Yala, a former president who claims ethnic ties with the mostly Balanta military, had warned of "consequences" if campaigning for the second round went ahead.

'SOLDIERS IN THE STREETS'

At a meeting in Abidjan of foreign ministers of the West African regional grouping ECOWAS, Guinea-Bissau Foreign Minister Mamadu Djalo Pires appealed for help from the international community.

"The situation is serious. The soldiers are occupying the streets," Pires told World News. "I spoke to the interim prime minister (Adiato Djalo Nandigna) and she said she was under fire", he added.

The ECOWAS ministers had been meeting to discuss the situation in Mali, which suffered a coup last month.

Guinea-Bissau Interior Minister Fernando Gomes, who like many other senior officials was keeping off the streets, told World News by phone in Bissau he was trying to find out what was happening in the capital. "I'm very worried," he said.

Top military officials in Bissau have been accused by the United States of being drugs runners, and diplomats say the army is aware of, if not involved in, every cocaine-filled plane that lands on its soil. Gomes Junior's critics say even he is complicit in the trade, a c harge he denies.

Guinea-Bissau is one of the world's most fragile states.

Its main official export is cashew nuts, an ordinary Bissau Guinean lives on less than $ 2 a day, and military meddling, political assassinations and health problems have prevented any president from serving a full term since multi-party politics began in 1994.

Thursday's shooting came just days after news that Angola, which is also a former Portuguese colony, but because of its oil resources, much richer than Guinea-Bissau, was ending its military mission to help modernize the army in the smaller state.

The Angolan mission, agreed in 2010, had been designed to help end the military coups that have plagued Guinea-Bissau since it won independence from Portugal in 1974.