Guinea-Bissau president arrested, army officers take control of country after disputed election

A group of army officers said on Wednesday they had seized power in coup-prone Guinea-Bissau, Radio France Internationale reported, after gunfire was heard at key locations in the capital.

The army officers said they had formed "The High Military Command for the Restoration of Order" and would be in charge of the West African nation until further notice.

The move came one day before the electoral commission was due to announce provisional results from a hotly contested presidential election between incumbent President Umaro Sissoco Embalo and top challenger Fernando Dias.

Both sides have claimed victory in Sunday's first round.

The race pits incumbent President Umaro Sissoco Embalo against top challenger Fernando Dias, and both sides claimed victory in the first round earlier this week.

It was not immediately clear who was involved in the shooting, which was witnessed in the area around the election commission by a Reuters journalist and two other residents.

The gunfire, which was also reported near the presidential palace and interior ministry building in the capital Bissau, lasted for about an hour but appeared to have stopped by 1400 GMT, the Reuters journalist said.

There was a heavy military presence outside the presidential palace, the Reuters journalist said.

One of the witnesses, a driver in Bissau who asked not to be named, told Reuters that residents were fleeing in panic from the scene before the gunfire died down.

"People are running everywhere," he said.

Competing claims from rival camps

A spokesperson for Embalo, Antonio Yaya Seidy, told Reuters that unidentified gunmen attacked the election commission to prevent an announcement of the vote results.

He said the men were affiliated with Dias, without providing evidence. A spokesperson for Dias did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However former prime minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, who lost to Embalo in a contested runoff in 2019 and has backed Dias in this election, said Dias had nothing to do with the incident.

Dias was meeting election observers when "some people erupted in the room to announce that there were gunshots in the centre of the town," said Pereira, who said he was in the same meeting.

Dias was safe and in Bissau, Pereira said.

He added he suspected Embalo was trying to simulate a coup so that he could declare an emergency, having determined he would be named the loser of the election, though he did not provide evidence for the claim.

Embalo says he has survived three coup attempts, but his critics have accused him of manufacturing crises as an excuse for crackdowns.

Gunfire rang out for hours in the capital in December 2023 in what Embalo's government said was an attempted putsch. Embalo dissolved parliament in response, and the country has gone without a functioning legislature ever since.

Major party excluded from vote 

Guinea-Bissau, a small coastal nation between Senegal and Guinea, saw at least nine coups between 1974, when it gained independence from Portugal, and 2020, when Embalo took office.

Embalo was seeking to become the first president in three decades to win a second consecutive term in Guinea-Bissau.

Pereira is the leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), the party that led the fight for independence from Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s.

The PAIGC was, for the first time, barred from fielding candidates in the elections this year after authorities said it filed papers late.

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