Simon Mann's warning for old 'friends'
Updated on 03 November 2009
While Old Etonian Simon Mann was in jail in Equatorial Guinea, he suggested to Channel 4 News he was not pleased with people he considered friends.
Using a bizarre analogy, he said: "If we go moutaineering, leaving the people down in base camp who have sponsored the expedition and who are with us.
"If we get caught up on the mountain in an avalanche and if those people down there, who I think are my friends, roll their sleeping bags up, put their tents down and go off back to London, then I can tell you one thing, they had better hope and pray that I don't get back off that mountain because if I do they're going to get an ice axe right between the eyes."
Less than two years into his 34-year sentence for plotting an armed coup, former SAS officer Simon Mann has been pardoned so what happens now he is freed?
A spokesman for President Obiang said the 57-year-old mercenary had been pardoned on humanitarian grounds and had 24 hours to leave the country.
Mann's family said they were delighted at his release, although he could still face questioning by Scotland Yard over the possible involvement of Mark Thatcher and others in the plot.
The old Etonian was originally arrested with around 70 other people, mostly former soldiers, when their aircraft arrived at an airport in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, in March 2004.
The plan was to put opposition leader Severo Moto, who is exiled in Madrid, in power and gain control over the country's oil wealth.
At first Mann denied that the group had come to collect weapons for a coup.
His lawyers claimed they were on their way to the Democratic Republic of Congo to help secure diamond mines.
He was jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe for conspiring to buy weapons of war.
Mann said he suffered a violent abduction in February from Chikrubi prison in Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea.
He has always insisted that he was not the main man behind the plot.
Equatorial Guinea held its first trial into the alleged plot in August 2004.
South African arms dealer Nick Du Toit was sentenced to 34 years in prison as a result of the case.
Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of former prime minister Baroness Thatcher, was given a suspended sentence in South Africa in relation to the funding of Mann's operation, though he has always denied any knowledge that a coup was being plotted.
During his trial Mann told the court the ex-prime minister's son was "part of the management team" behind the failed plot and "not just an investor".
Four other men - Mr du Toit, Sergio Cardoso, Jose Domingos and George Alerson were also granted pardons for their part in the plot.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Obono Olo, who was the attorney general who prosecuted the coup plotters, said Mann and his accomplices would be freed at some point today.
He denied rumours that Mann was unwell, saying that he was "fine, fit."
The country is Africa's third-biggest oil producer but many of its people remain poor.
It is also considered to be among the continent's worst violators of human rights.
