Dog of War's bloody career bared in court

PARIS - Bob Denard, the world's most famous mercenary, walked free this week after he was acquitted of assassination in a trial that laid bare his 40-year role in coups, arms-smuggling and bloody uprisings in more than a dozen countries.

Bordeaux-born Denard, whose real name is Gilbert Bourgeaud, blazed a trail across the newly independent countries of sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s - often, he said, working in the pay of France and South Africa's former apartheid regime.

Now aged 70, Denard has a record that jars with his avuncular silver hair, smart blazer and soft blue eyes. He has been associated with coups or skulduggery in French Indochina, French North Africa, the Congo, Yemen, Zaire, Angola, Biafra, Gabon, Mauritania, Kurdistan, Guinea Conakry, Libya, Benin, Chad and Vanuatu.

He claims to have been variously supported by the governments of France, South Africa and Portugal, and to have been backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the French and British secret services.

But his main stamping ground was the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Comoros, where he came and went with staggering impunity, overthrowing, then restoring and, according to prosecutors, finally assassinating a French-backed puppet President.

In 1975, acting, he says, with the approval of the French foreign espionage service, Denard carried out a coup against the Comoros President, Ahmed Abdallah, replacing him with the more amenable Ali Soilih.

After Soilih turned out, according to Denard's court testimony, to be a Pol Pot-type of tyrant, moves were set in motion four years later to bring back Abdallah.

Denard took an ocean-going trawler, the MS Antinea, from the Breton port of Lorient around the Cape of Good Hope.

After a 33-day trip, his 46-man army landed in Moroni, the Comoran capital, and quickly took control of the country, reinstalling Abdallah.

Denard consolidated his control by creating a 500-man presidential guard, whose $US100,000-a-month cost was paid by the apartheid regime of South Africa.

By 1989, Denard had fallen out with Abdallah, apparently because the international community was refusing to provide aid to the poverty-stricken Comoros unless the President kicked the mercenaries out.

On the night of November 26, 1989, Abdallah was gunned down in the presidential palace.

French prosecutors, accusing Denard and his former right-hand man, Dominique Malacrino, aged 46, of plotting Abdallah's death, demanded a jail term of 12 to 15 years.

According to the prosecution's case, on the night of the killing Denard, Malacrino and a third mercenary, Jean-Paul Guerrier, who is on the run, were in the presidential palace when gunfire and shooting erupted outside.

The noise, it was alleged, was aimed at convincing Abdallah that the Army was staging a coup. Terrified, the President signed an order to disarm the troops but minutes later fell to the floor dead.

Denard and Malacrino said Abdallah was accidentally killed by a bodyguard, Abdallah Jaffar, who panicked when he heard the shooting and unloaded his gun on Denard, who leaped out of the way. Instead, the rounds hit Abdallah. Jaffar in turn was shot dead by Denard, they said.

Denard produced glowing character references in his defence. Letters from his seven former wives described in remarkably similar terms his courage, constancy and fidelity and stressed how he had funded the education of each of his eight children.

The court heard how Denard had even changed his religion to suit his wives, becoming Jewish to marry Gisele in Morocco, switching back to Catholicism while he was husband of Claudette and Christiane, then turning Muslim when he wed Anna in the Comoros.

But the case against Denard fell apart on the lack of outside witnesses to the killing other than the two defendants, as well as conclusive forensic evidence.

Prosecuting attorney Paul Bilger railed against Denard, clearly frustrated at his inability to nail down the sinuous mercenary. But even he agreed that Denard's saga was extraordinary in its scale and colour.

This was Shakespeare revisited by Agatha Christie, a full-blown tragedy with noise, with fury, with Machiavellianism, he said.

Denard has never been sentenced to jail for his deeds, although he has spent more than a year in detention awaiting trials and was given a suspended five-year term for his role in an attempted coup in the west African state of Benin in 1977, which was handed down after he returned voluntarily to France.

Many in France suspected that Denard knows where so many political bodies are buried - generations of leaders and advisers turned to him to help topple regimes deemed hostile to French interests - that he was guaranteed an easy ride, even in a jury trial.

Denard has turned his knowledge and celebrity to lucrative gain. He bought up a publication, Fire, billed as the magazine for the man of action, set up a newsletter on sub-equatorial Africa, and wrote an autobiography, Corsaire de la Republique (Pirate of the Republic).


Catherine Field reports on the trial of a top mercenary