Angolan authorities said today two people suspected of taking part in an attack on a bus carrying the Togo national soccer team to the African Nations have been arrested.
The Togo team’s assistant coach and media officer died in the shooting last Friday, which also left their Angolan bus driver fatally wounded.
Provincial prosecutor Antonio Nito said in a statement the two suspects belonged to the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) - a heavily militarised oil-producing province geographically separated from northern Angola.
The FLEC, which has being fighting for independence from Angola for over 30 years, had claimed responsibility for the attack, which took place shortly after the Togo team's bus crossed from Congo Republic.
"The two elements of FLEC were captured at the scene of the incident," Mr Nito said in a statement published on the state news agency Angop.
Togo's team returned home yesterday with the bodies of their assistant coach and media officer to begin three days of mourning, but the sports minister said they still hoped to be able to join the cup, Africa's biggest sports tournament.
Togolese goalkeeper Kodjovi Obilale is stable in hospital in Johannesburg today after being operated on for serious gunshot wounds, doctors said.
The attack has acutely embarrassed the Angolan government, which had declared the FLEC dead, and spent $1 billion preparing for a Nations Cup to showcase a gradual recovery from decades of civil war that only ended in 2002.
Experts say the FLEC is riven by factionalism and may have as few as 200 gunmen, largely confined to remote northern Cabinda. But its leadership, based in France, has vowed to carry out more attacks, and Angola has stepped up security.
Rodrigues Mingas, FLEC's secretary general, said the attack had been aimed not at the Togolese players but at the Angolan forces at the head of the convoy.
"So it was pure chance that the gunfire hit the players," he told France 24 television. "We don't have anything to do with the Togolese and we present our condolences to the African families and the Togo government."
Togo's players said the rebels had sprayed gunfire at them for 15 minutes or more, but the accounts have been confused.
Togo's French coach, Hubert Velud, told L'Equipe: "We were shot at from both sides of the bus, from 10 metres. We owe our lives to the nerves of our driver, who was able to keep driving for a few hundred metres before the army intervened."
But midfielder Moustapha Salifou told his club's website: "The driver of the coach was shot almost immediately and died instantly, so we were just stopped on the road with nowhere to go."
Cabinda provides half the oil output of Angola, a rival to Nigeria as Africa's biggest producer, and the US-based Human Rights Watch last year accused Angola of illegally imprisoning and torturing those suspected of fomenting separatism.