Congo arrests 32 foreigners in "coup plot"

KINSHASA, May 24 (Reuters) Congolese authorities said today they had arrested 32 foreigners, including South Africans, Nigerians and Americans, in what they called a suspected coup plot ahead of historic elections in July.

But diplomats and security sources played down the announcement, saying they believed the alleged plot had to do with domestic political rivalries and posed no real threat to the upcoming July 30 parliamentary and presidential polls in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

They will be the first multi-party polls in four decades in the vast central African country, a former Belgian colony.

''About 30 people claiming to work for a security company have been arrested. They say they were working for the company but our information suggests they had other intentions,'' government spokesman Henri Mova Sakanyi told Reuters.

Diplomats said the 32 arrested included 20 white South Africans working for a South African security firm in Congo, Omega Risk Solutions. They were being accused of spying.

Sakanyi said the group would be put on trial. ''They wanted to destabilise the institutions of the country, that means a coup attempt,'' he said.

Kemal Saiki, spokesman for the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said the U.N. had learned of the arrests from the announcement by the Congolese authorities.

''We've noted it. It was announced very publicly, but we have no information that it was any kind of threat to the election process,'' he told Reuters.

A Congolese security source said he believed domestic political motives were behind the arrests.

''It's not as big as people are saying it is. I don't think there was any real coup threat,'' he said, asking not to be named.

Election campaigning in Congo is heating up as the election approaches. The landmark polls are intended to draw a line under a five-year war which was officially declared over in 2003.

But fighting by rebels and renegade militias has continued in many parts of the vast country, especially the east, prolonging a humanitarian crisis that has killed 4 million people since the conflict first began in 1998.

Incumbent President Joseph Kabila is among 33 candidates running for the presidency, which also include former rebel leaders he fought against. Several thousand candidates have applied to stand for 500 parliamentary seats.

A Western diplomat said the foreigners arrested were being accused of being mercenaries, as they had recently returned from working in Iraq.

''This is a clear sign that things are getting very tense in Kinshasa in the lead up to the elections,'' a regional analyst, who declined to be named, said. ''It is not clear whether this is a front to clamp down on people.'' The U.N. has its biggest peacekeeping force in the world in Congo, but its 17,000 soldiers and policemen deployed there are thinly stretched.

The European Union has also agreed to deploy a peacekeeping force to Congo during the elections to help with security.

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