Four Nigerian military officers and a civilian were accused today of plotting to overthrow President Olusegun Obasanjo by firing a rocket at his helicopter, court documents showed.
The former chief security adviser to the late military dictator Sani Abacha, Major Hamza al-Mustapha, and a civilian pleaded not guilty and were remanded in custody, while three other military officers were charged in absentia.
The charges were the first official confirmation of a coup plot in the world's eighth largest oil exporter, which saw democracy return five years ago, after months of speculation about what the government had previously called a "serious breach of national security".
The five were charged with conspiring "among themselves and others still at large to overthrow the Federal Government of Nigeria", the court document said.
Major Al-Mustapha was accused of disbursing money "for the purpose of purchasing a Stinger surface-to-air missile to be used in shooting down the president's helicopter with the president on board," the document added.
Major Al-Mustapha, who was one of the most powerful figures in the iron-fisted dictatorship of Abacha, was already in jail facing charges of attempted murder of a newspaper publisher in 1995.
The other officers charged in absentia were Colonel Mohammed Ibn Umar Adeka, Commander Yakubu Kudambo and Lieutenant Tijani Abdallah, while the civilian was named Onwuchekwa Okorie.
The charge sheet said Al-Mustapha funded several trips by Abdallah between November 2002 and March 2004 to Ivory Coast and Togo to acquire a missile for the attack.
"Commander Kudambo drafted the framework of a coup speech and the outlook of the intended government," the document said.
The Nigerian military has successfully overthrown the government six times since independence from Britain in 1960. There have been many more failed coups, and still more "phantom coup plots" used as a ruse to round up opponents of the government.
Mr Obasanjo, who was a military ruler of Nigeria in the 1970s, was elected president in 1999, ending 15 years of military rule. He won a second term in elections last year that observers said were marred by rigging and violence.
Mr Obasanjo has been feted abroad for bringing democracy back to Nigeria and attempting to reform a corrupt and collapsing state. But his popularity has slumped at home because he has failed to lift living standards of the majority, who live on less than a dollar a day.