A gun was placed to his head and he was threatened with death by an adviser to Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, mercenary Nick du Toit has told Rapport.

In a three-hour-interview with the newspaper, Du Toit said he was dragged from his cell in the middle of the night by the adviser, who was drunk at the time.

Du Toit spent more than five years in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach prison after a failed attempt to overthrow Nguema, for which he and the rest of the coup plotters received sentences of 34 years each.

Tales of torture

He was unexpectedly released on November 5 with fellow coup plotters Briton Simon Mann and South Africans, George Alerson, Sergio Cardoso and Jose Sundays after receiving a presidential pardon.

He told Rapport they were tortured in prison with electric shock devices and burning cigarettes. One coup plotter died of a heart attack while being tortured, he said.

Under the headline "My prison hell" the newspaper reported that the scars were still visible where handcuffs had cut Du Toit's wrists to the bone, then rusted in place. He had lost 37kg in prison.

In the interview, Du Toit reiterated his contention that the South African government knew about the planned coup six months beforehand, but did nothing to stop it, in effect tacitly approving it.

"We were under the impression that if the thing actually went ahead, the government would support us... we were covered," he told the newspaper, adding that this impression was conveyed to them by Mann, the former recce who was the architect of the plan.

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