Mann silenced - Du Toit
2009-11-22 17:17
Johannesburg - The real story of the role played by Sir Mark Thatcher and the secretive financiers who backed the failed Equatorial Guinea coup plot will probably never be known, former mercenary Niek du Toit says.
“Simon Mann (the British architect of the coup) has been silenced,” Du Toit said. “I believe that even the book he plans to write won't contain the revelations that everyone expects, because he has been paid to keep quiet.”
Mann is reportedly negotiating a £2-million book deal about the coup, but there have been reports in the British press that the United Kingdom's Foreign Office has ordered him to remain silent.
Du Toit said he met Thatcher, the son of former British Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, only once to discuss the purchase of a helicopter.
Mann later told him Thatcher had paid $600 000 for a helicopter that was to be used in the coup.
Du Toit says he does not feel any bitterness toward Mann.
“I've known him a long time, since the days of Executive Outcomes. We knew what we were letting ourselves in for and it just didn't work out.”
When Mann was extradited from Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea last year, he was kept separately from Du Toit. The most they could do was wave at each other.
But Du Toit believes something should be done to stop the “British contingent”, as he describes them, from recruiting soldiers in South Africa to “do their dirty work for them”.
“This British contingent uses other people to do their dirty work. It is an opportunity for the former soldiers here to get work, but it is not the right path.
“I want to see that they are stopped, because they are misusing South Africans.
“At the end of the day, the guys get a salary for a while and then they get tossed away when they are no longer needed.”