Frederick Forsyth sees Guinea coup up close

Frederick Forsyth, the thriller writer and former newspaper foreign correspendent, found himself at the centre of a real-life drama this week that could have come directly from the pages of one of his most famous bestsellers, The Dogs of War.

Just hours before he touched down in the troubled west African nation of Guinea-Bissau, where he had gone to research a new novel, a bomb hidden under a staircase blew apart the country’s armed forces chief. A few hours later, the President was shot dead and, according to Forsyth, hacked to pieces.

The 70-year-old author had been reading in bed when he had heard a boom before dawn on Monday and thought, "That wasn't a car door slamming". This, it transpired, was the prelude to the double assassination of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira and his military rival, General Batiste Tagme na Waie.

"I didn't come for a coup d'etat or regime change, but that's what I ran into," Forsyth told the Independent. According to Forsyth's sources, Vieira survived an initial rocket attack only to be shot four times, "slung into the back of a pick-up truck... and cut to pieces with machetes" by soldiers bent on avenging their own chief's death.

Forsyth said he'd come to Guinea-Bissau for "the flavour, the odour, of a pretty washed-up, impoverished, failed west African mangrove swamp" and hadn't been disappointed by what he found. "I thought, what is the most disastrous part of west Africa, and by a mile, it's Guinea-Bissau. If you drive around you'll see why: one wrecked building after another, one mountain of garbage after another. A navy with no ships, an air force with no airplanes."

He said that his next novel, which will be another "international thriller involving the usual mix of forces of law and order, criminality, special forces, US Green Berets, a coup d'etat, and a lot of money", will, of course, be set Guinea-Bissau. ·