WITNESS: Media menace at British coup plotter's trial

Daniel Flynn, correspondent for West and Central Africa, joined Reuters in 1998 and has worked in Venezuela and Spain. In the following story he describes his experience of the trial of Simon Mann in Equatorial Guinea.

By Daniel Flynn

MALABO (Reuters) - A huddle of reporters waited in a tropical downpour outside a courthouse in Equatorial Guinea as Simon Mann, one of Africa's most notorious foreign mercenaries, arrived in a convoy of armored vehicles.

His trial promised revelations about a failed 2004 coup in this secretive but oil-rich West African state: about a dozen British journalists had come to the remote island capital.

The aristocratic heir to a brewing fortune who was educated at exclusive school Eton, he was expected to implicate the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, shadowy London-based tycoon Eli Calil and some foreign governments.

But first, we had to get into the heavily guarded court.

"Take off your shoes!" barked a muscular machine gun-toting soldier, tossing pairs of plastic flip-flops on the floor.

We were ordered to remove watches and jewelry, and hand over mobile phones, pens and paper.

"We've been told that pens can be filled with lethal substances," said one official, while snipers stared down from nearby rooftops.

As foreign diplomats strolled past fully shod and chatting on their phones, I was reminded that authorities in tiny Equatorial Guinea do not take kindly to foreign media scrutiny.

"Journalists are the most dangerous people in the world!" an official told me last year, turning down a previous visa application to visit humanitarian projects.

The discovery of oil in the 1990s transformed this country of 600,000 people from one of Africa's most unstable and forgotten backwaters -- notable only for the brutality of its governments -- into a hotspot for foreign petroleum companies.

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who killed his uncle to seize power in 1979, keeps a tight control of the media. In 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranked the former Spanish colony among the world's five most censored countries.

After three previous failed attempts to get a visa, on this occasion a TV colleague and I simply jumped on the first plane to Malabo and hoped for the best.

For Obiang's regime, the trial was an opportunity to present itself as a victim of post-colonial machinations, and when we landed, I was surprised to be welcomed with open arms.

A plain-clothes policeman quickly stamped our passports and drove us to a hotel. We were being monitored: when we changed guesthouse, the policeman arrived at breakfast with a friend to act as our 'driver'.