LIBREVILLE, Gabon -- France evacuated hundreds of foreigners from Gabon Friday as rioting sparked by the mysterious death of an opposition leader spread to the interior of the former French colony, security sources said.
In the capital, more than 100 prisoners escaped from a Libreville jail where guards have recently been on strike, seized weapons from a government armory and fired at government troops, police said.
Hundreds of French-trained elite Presidential Guardsmen then surrounded the armed prisoners, who built barricades in the Libreville neighborhood of Nkembo, said the sources.
President Omar Bongo blamed the introduction of a multi-party system for the unrest that began Wednesday after opposition leader Joseph Redjambe of the Gabonese Progress Party was found dead in mysterious circumstances in a room at the Hotel Dowe in the capital.
In Lambrene, 150 miles inland from Libreville, hundreds of rioters armed with clubs and stones battered down the gates of the city jail and freed about 50 prisoners inside, then overran and looted the city's biggest department store, the sources said.
It was not immediately clear if the Lamberene rioting was directly linked to Redjambe's death Tuesday, which political sources say has become a focal point for dissatisfaction with Bongo's rule.
Two French Air Force Transall transport airplanes ferried more than 500 foreigners, mainly women and children, from the southern oil city of Port-Gentil to Libreville Friday.
An Air France Boeing 747 and a French military DC-8 transport airplane sent by the French government collected the foreigners from Libreville and flew them to Paris. They were scheduled to arrive in Paris late Friday.
Diplomatic sources said the majority of those who asked to be evacuated were French but there also were scores of Americans and several Dutch and British nationals.
Gabonese authorities Thursday expelled three television crews from the French network TF-1 and a reporter for the French radio station Radio France Internationale, spokesmen in Paris said.
The Libreville shooting shattered a day of relative calm, and authorities prepared to impose a curfew for a third night running.
The leading L'Union newspaper said two people died in the three days of rioting and 17 others were injured. But hospital sources said the number of injured was higher. Officials have released no casualty figures.
At Port Gentil, 80 miles south of the capital, demonstrators attacked the offices of the state-run electricity board and French Foreign Legion troops sent in Thursday patrolled the streets, security sources said.
The French troops were sent in to Port Gentil Thursday to back Gabonese commandos who parachuted into the city, considered Gabon's economic center.
Bongo appealed to his countrymen Friday to understand 'one cannot play politics using the streets as a weapon.'
'I have said clearly that a multiparty system has advantages and many disadvantages,' Bongo told France Inter radio.
The National Assembly Tuesday approved a new constitution introducing a multiparty state with elections to be held in October, ending 22 years of one-party rule by Bongo's Gabonese Democratic Party.
However Bongo said he would not go back on the reforms.
In Paris, Cooperation Minister Jacques Pelletier said the situation at Port Gentil remains 'tense and worrisome' and that there were 'acts of looting' in the city during the night.
About 3,500 of the 15,000 French nationals in Gabon are based at Port Gentil. Many foreigners are employed by oil companies operating in the African nation.
France flew 200 Foreign Legion troops to Gabon on Thursday to reinforce some 500 French troops based there under terms of a bilateral defense agreement.
A spokesman for ELF-Gabon, the largest oil company in Gabon, said its personnel will remain there for now but that it turned off its offshore oil production pumps on Wednesday.
The demonstrators have been demanding Bongo's resignation, alleging his aides may have been involved in the death of Redjambe. But in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper published Friday, Bongo seemed unruffled by the political crisis.
'Nothing is happening. In Libreville, everything is all right. Everything is back in order,' he said.
'People are telling stories about the regime,' Bongo said. 'People have written that there were assassinations in Gabon. You have to see how things have happened. When one is in politics and you go into a hotel with a girl ...'
Authorities say Redjambe was lured to the Hotel Dowe by a woman from the Ivory Coast, Jeanne Canonne, who has disappeared.
