Gun attack on Togo team bus casts pall over African Nations Cup
The gunfire on Friday was as unexpected as it was deadly.
At one moment, the players on Togo’s national team were laughing and joking as the bus they were traveling in made its way deeper into Angola.
They had crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the squad had been training for the African Nations Cup, scheduled to start today in Angola. The players were looking ahead to their opening game on Monday against Ghana.
The next moment, the players -- among them Manchester City striker Emmanuel Adebayor and Aston Villa midfielder Moustapha Salifou -- were cowering in fear, trying to evade the hail of machine-gun bullets that ripped into the bus and caused instant bloodshed and terror.
“We were machine-gunned like dogs,” Thomas Dossevi, a forward from Nantes in France’s Ligue 1, told Radio Monte Carlo, a French radio station.
“The shooting lasted for half an hour and I could hear the bullets whistling past me,” Aston Villa’s website quoted Salifou as saying. “It was like a movie.
“It was horrific. Everybody was crying. . . . I don’t know how anyone could do this. We were looking forward to playing football and to being together as a team.”
Security forces accompanying the team returned fire, but by the time the 30-minute gun battle was over, the bus driver was dead and 10 others had been wounded, including defender Serge Akakpo and goalkeeper Kodjovi Obilale.
Two of the wounded, an assistant coach and a media spokesman, died Saturday, and Obilale was in serious condition after being flown to a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The attack, in Angola’s oil-producing region of Cabinda, was believed to have been carried out by separatist rebels.
Adebayor, one of the continent’s highest-profile players, was at a loss to understand the reason for why Togo was targeted.
“I don’t know whether I am the target or not, but I know my team or my country is the target,” he said. “Why, I don’t know.”
The reaction
After the shock came the finger-pointing, but not at Togo’s security detail.
“To be honest, without the security I would not be here talking,” Adebayor told BBC’s World Service. “Maybe you would be talking to my dead body. The security have done their job quite well.
“The thing we don’t understand is why they shot on our bus, that’s the question now.”
One Angolan government minister was emphatic but not specific on where the blame lay. “This was an act of terrorism,” Antonio Bento Bembe said.
Togo Coach Hubert Velud, shaken and angry, put it another way.
“It’s an act of barbarism while we are here to celebrate African football,” he said.
Not surprisingly, FIFA, the sport’s putative global leader, passed the buck.
“FIFA and its president, Joseph S. Blatter, are deeply moved by today’s incidents which affected Togo’s national team, to whom they express their utmost sympathy,” was the statement on its website.
“FIFA is in touch with the African Football Confederation (CAF) and its president, Issa Hayatou, from which it expects a full report on the situation.”
That was it. Short, cold, almost indifferent. Not a word from Blatter himself. Not even a card.
As for CAF, its official statement Friday seemed more concerned with stating that “important” and “powerful” delegations of government and soccer federation officials would be investigating the shooting than in reaching out to help the victims.
It did question why the Togo team had traveled into Angola by bus when the competing teams had been instructed to travel only by air. There was no immediate answer to that.
By Saturday night, the eve of the tournament, CAF had not even confirmed whether the event would go ahead and how it would be structured if it did.
The aftermath
Dossevi told the Associated Press in a phone interview Saturday that the team would pull out of the competition and fly out of Angola early today. But midfielder Alaixys Romao told L’Equipe the team had decided to play.
“The entire delegation just met and, after all, we’ll be on the pitch Monday to play against Ghana,” Romao said in a story on the French sports daily’s website.
There were callsfrom the English Premier League and Italy’s Serie A for players to abandon the event before it had even begun.
“If the players’ safety cannot be guaranteed, then they should be sent home,” said a spokesman for Portsmouth.
In Italy, Udinese demanded “the immediate return” of midfielder Kwadwo Asamoah, a member of Ghana’s national team, noting that Ghana is scheduled to play its first-round games in Cabinda, “where the cowardly and shocking attack on the Togolese players took place.”
Josep “Pep” Guardiola, the coach of world, European and Spanish champion Barcelona, said the club was trying to contact two of its players, Yaya Toure of the Ivory Coast and Seydou Keita of Mali.
“They are obliged to know the level of danger,” Guardiola told the El Mundo newspaper. “Human life and everyone’s safety is the most important thing of all.”
Said Tottenham Hotspur Coach Harry Redknapp: “It’s frightening. I agree it’s worth considering calling the whole thing off. We can’t just sit around and wait for the next shooting.”
The future
This was supposed to be Africa’s year, the year the World Cup is played on African soil for the first time.
Not surprisingly, South Africa, which will stage the June 11-July 11 event, was quick to distance itself from the tragedy in Angola.
“It has no impact on our World Cup,” Danny Jordaan, head of the South Africa 2010 organizing committee, told Reuters in Luanda, Angola.
“The world understands that sovereign counties are responsible for their own safety and security, and to say that what happened in Angola impacts on the World Cup in South Africa is the same as suggesting that when a bomb goes off in Spain it threatens London’s ability to host the next Olympics.
“It is nonsensical for South Africa to be tainted with what happens in Angola, which is not even one of our neighboring countries.”
So where does that leave everything? The African Nations Cup will probably go ahead today, no doubt with the symbolic black armbands and moment of silence before the opening match in Luanda between host Angola and Mali.
Too much prestige, too much African pride, is at stake to cancel the event.
Listen, for instance, to the almost chilling comment made by Kaba Kone, general manager of the Ivory Coast team, when he told reporters that the team would remain in the tournament.
“We did not come here to play with death but to play football,” Kone said.
That will come as little comfort to Togo and especially to the families of those who lost their lives. For them, the sport will never be the same.
