Death of a dog of war

People flying into Harare may, if they have an eye for such things, see the unmistakable shape of a Boeing 727, forlorn and rotting on the other side of the airport.

The Boeing has been parked there since March 7 2004, seized soon after landing in the small hours. On board were the three cockpit crew and 61 other men who, depending on who’s talking, were mercenaries, security guards or pawns in a military misadventure cooked up in the highest British circles and designed to overthrow Equatorial Guinea president-forever Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Their leader, Simon Mann, Old Etonian, ex-Scots Guardsman and private military contractor, was on hand to meet the aircraft that had landed to fetch him and a lot of weaponry.

In an interview years later, his horror was vivid and visceral as he described one of his men lifting the tarpaulin off the back of a truck and seeing there was nothing underneath but a few rusty rifles. 

Mann did four years in the hellhole known as Chikurubi maximum-security prison before being rendered, illegally, to Equatorial Guinea, where he was given a further 34 years for his part in the coup-that-wasn’t. An arrangement of some sort saw his sentence commuted and in 2009 he walked out of Black Beach prison a free man, albeit one with certain resentments including towards the South Africans who may have ratted him out.

Death usually comes violently to those in this business: former paratrooper and psychopath Costas Georgiou, aka Colonel Callan, executed by firing squad in Angola in 1975 after a murderous spree; Executive Outcomes mercenaries gunned down while exiting a helicopter in Angola; or Wagner Group leaders Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, blown up in their business jet flying over Russia en route to St Petersburg. 

However, Mann, 72, died last week of a heart attack while exercising at the gym. A thoroughly understated British way for a former dog of war to make the journey to Valhalla.