Togolese government officials and relatives receive the remains of Togolese assistant soccer coach Amalete Abalo in the capital Lome, January 10, 2010. Togo's national soccer team landed back in Lome on Sunday, a Reuters witness said, after suffering a deadly ambush in Angola before the start of the African Nations Cup tournament. The team was attacked by separatist rebels on Friday as it travelled by bus through Angola's Cabinda enclave. The assistant coach and a press officer were killed, as was the bus driver. Picture taken January 10, 2010. (REUTERS/Noel Kokou Tadegnon)

CABINDA, Angola – Angola said on Monday it had arrested two people suspected of taking part in an attack on a bus carrying the Togo national soccer team to the African Nations Cup in which two delegation members were killed.

Provincial prosecutor Antonio Nito said in a statement the two suspects belonged to the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) — a heavily militarized oil-producing province geographically separated from northern Angola.

The FLEC, which has being fighting for independence from Angola for over 30 years, had claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, which took place shortly after the Togo team’s bus crossed from Congo Republic.

“The two elements of FLEC were captured at the scene of the incident,” Nito said in a statement published on the state news agency Angop.

Togo’s team returned home on Sunday together with the bodies of their assistant coach and media officer to begin three days of mourning, but the sports minister said they still hoped to be able to join the Cup, Africa’s biggest sports tournament.

The bus driver was also killed and Togolese goalkeeper Kodjovi Obilale was stable in hospital in Johannesburg after being operated on for serious gunshot wounds, doctors said.

SHOWCASE

The attack has acutely embarrassed the Angolan government, which had declared the FLEC dead, and spent $1 billion preparing for a Nations Cup to showcase a gradual recovery from decades of civil war that only ended in 2002.

Experts say the FLEC is riven by factionalism and may have as few as 200 gunmen, largely confined to remote northern Cabinda. But its leadership, based in France, has vowed to carry out more attacks, and Angola has stepped up security.

Rodrigues Mingas, FLEC’s secretary general, said the attack had been aimed not at the Togolese players but at the Angolan forces at the head of the convoy.

“So it was pure chance that the gunfire hit the players,” he told France 24 television. “We don’t have anything to do with the Togolese and we present our condolences to the African families and the Togo government.”

Togo’s players said the rebels had sprayed gunfire at them for 15 minutes or more, but the accounts have been confused.

Togo’s French coach, Hubert Velud, told the paper L’Equipe: “We were shot at from both sides of the bus, from 10 metres. We owe our lives to the nerves of our driver, who was able to keep driving for a few hundred metres before the army intervened.”

But midfielder Moustapha Salifou told his club’s website:

“The driver of the coach was shot almost immediately and died instantly, so we were just stopped on the road with nowhere to go.”

OIL REGION

Cabinda provides half the oil output of Angola, a rival to Nigeria as Africa’s biggest producer, and the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch last year accused Angola of illegally imprisoning and torturing those suspected of fomenting separatism.

“The apparent rebel attack against a convoy of international athletes is shocking,” Georgette Gagnon, HRW’s Africa director, said on Monday.

“Angolan authorities are entitled to step up security in response to this attack. But this does not justify illegal arrests or crackdowns on the media, as it has done in Cabinda in the past.”

Martinho Nombo, a lawyer and human rights activist in Cabinda, said he feared authorities were already treating the suspects as guilty.

“The statement by the prosecutor says the two people arrested are the attackers of the Togo team, yet they have never gone on trial,” he said.