MALE, Maldives -- Nine former members of Britain's crack Special Air Services commando squad were hired to kill President Maumoon Bdul Gayoom in an attempted coup last year, it was charged Sunday.
The government announced last April that a coup attempt had been foiled in February but no details were provided until now in a tale of international intrigue.
Special prosecutor Ahamed Zahir gave a High Court confessions allegedly signed by of two of the mercenraies and said Ahamed Naseem, brother-in-law of former Maldives President Ibrahim Nasir, was the mastermind of the coup plot.
The court also was told that President Gayoom's health minister, Mohamed Mustafa Hussain, and a leading Maldives businessman, Khua Mohamed Yusuf, were 'principal accomplices' in the attempt to topple the government of the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago nation.
Zahir said the confession were made by Harold Stanley Davidson, 57, a former SAS staff sergeant, and Philip Anthony Sessarego, 28, a former SAS corporal. The two men flew to Male last May to voluntarilty make statements on the plot, the prosecutor said.
The nine soldiers of fortune have not been charged in the case.
Davidson was quoted as saying the mercenaries, using Sri Lanka, 500 miles east of the Maldives, as their base, made three unsuccessful attempts to carry out their mission.
Each former SAS member was promised $60,000 'as an inducement,' Sessarego said in the confession.
Zahir said Naseem, living in exile in Singapore, hired the merecenaries through a 'legitimate British security firm.'
Davidson said he and seven other former members of the SAS, whose motto is 'Who dares, wins,' were approached for the job by former SAS non-commissioned officer Robert Wise.
'I was told that we were working for ex-President Nasir of the Maldives who was eager to get back into power and that he was pro-West,' Davidson's statement said, adding that 'the president in power was a dictator working with the Libyans and that the people were oppressed.'
The mercenaries arrived in Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka, on Feb. 4, 1980, the prosecutor said, and were supplied with weapons, bullet-proof vests and 'knock out' gas cannisters.
But Davidson said the coup attempt was called off because 'the whole situation briefed had been misleading,' and some of the former SAS men began to have second thoughts about the mission.
'After some argument it was decided that, as none of the team was prepared to do the job, we would go back to the U.K.,' Davidson said.
