Mutinous Guinea troops demand military chiefs go

Guinean soldiers raised new demands on Thursday for the sacking of army, navy and air force chiefs, refusing to abandon a violent four-day-old mutiny despite a government offer to pay them years of wage arrears.
Since Monday, junior soldiers in several towns across the world's top bauxite exporter have fired guns in the air, attacked senior officers, and looted shops and rice stores to press demands ranging from cash to leadership changes.
Several people have been killed and dozens hurt by stray bullets raining down on crowded slums. New Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souare granted most of the soldiers' demands late on Tuesday, including for the sacking of the defence minister, but the concessions appeared to have only emboldened the rebels.
"They are demanding that the heads of all military services quit," said one, a junior officer at Camp Alpha Yaya Diallo in the capital Conakry, where the protests began on Monday. He said soldiers wanted the heads of the army, navy and air force to go.
Analysts say Souare's capitulation to most of the soldiers' demands, including paying them 5 million Guinean francs ($1,140) each, risks encouraging further unrest. Mutinous soldiers on board three military trucks burst into the international airport adjacent to the Alpha Yaya Diallo camp late on Wednesday, forcing a cargo plane that had just landed to leave again, an airport worker and a soldier told Reuters.
Later, heavily armed loyalist forces, including members of President Lansana Conte's guard, took control of the airport. Other renegade troops ransacked the house of the navy chief overnight, and others shot into the air in poor parts of town, provoking fear in a population which has suffered years of military uprisings and abuses by Conte's security forces.
Military sources say the mutineers include some who fought as mercenaries in pro-Guinean rebel factions during a 1990s civil war in neighbouring Liberia. Several private radio stations as well as RFI, the foreign radio service of former colonial power France and a key source of information for many West Africans, could not be found on their usual FM bands in Conakry.
State radio continued its usual broadcasting, mainly music. Souare was named by Conte to replace Lansana Kouyate, a consensus prime minister appointed under a deal to end a strike last year which saw bloody anti-government riots in which some 130 people were killed and which disrupted shipments of the aluminium ore bauxite.
Some union leaders have threatened another general strike which would pose a fresh challenge to the authority of the ageing Conte, a chain-smoking diabetic whose ill-health has caused uncertainty over his succession.