NOUAKCHOTT, June 8: Sporadic gunfire rang through the Mauritanian capital on Sunday, where looters were on the rampage after the government of this northwest African Islamic republic claimed to have put down an attempted coup.

State radio said soldiers loyal to the country’s pro-Western Arab president had crushed a coup attempt, the first official statement on fighting that erupted early Sunday in Nouakchott.

“Remain calmly in your homes, the situation has been brought under control under the enlightened guidance” of President Maaouiya Ould Taya, the director of state radio told listeners.

Ould Taya, who had recently cracked down on Muslim extremists in the west African desert state, was safe and in good health following the incidents, government sources said.

There was however no independent confirmation of who the alleged coup plotters were nor of what exactly had happened overnight and state radio went back off the air less shortly after the announcement.

Fighting erupted at about 1:00 am (0100 GMT), with automatic gunfire and explosions reported near the presidential building and army headquarters in the city centre.

Witnesses said the state radio building and the education ministry had been ransacked, blaming prisoners who reportedly escaped from their cells when prison guards abandoned their posts in the early morning chaos.

Soldiers and civilians wounded overnight were being treated in hospitals in Nouakchott, hospital sources said, but they did not say how many were injured or give details of their injuries.

Some witnesses said a plane had flown over the city several times after the fighting began, repeatedly drawing anti-aircraft fire. Sporadic fighting continued until early afternoon near an army barracks where the would-be putschists were based, a government source said.

At the state television and radio station in the far northwest of the city, a person who answered the phone told AFP fighting there had stopped, after earlier reports said a tank was on fire outside the building.

“There is no problem now. We are from the presidential army unit. The premises have been pacified,” he said.

The reported coup attempt came amid heightened tension in the vast Sahara desert country of just 2.7 million people, about a third of whom are black and the rest are either of Arab or mixed descent.

The government of the Islamic republic has in recent weeks been cracking down on Muslim militants.

On Tuesday, 36 people were charged with offences relating from “plotting against the constitutional order” to membership of illegal organisations.

Official media have launched a campaign against extremism, with political and religious commentators stating that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network was “alive and well and living in Mauritania”.

In May Mauritanian Prime Minister Cheikh El-Avia Ould Mohamed Khouna warned that extremists hoped to use Mauritania as a new base, after being chased out of other countries.

The arrests in Mauritania come amid a heightened terrorist alert worldwide, fuelled by extremist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, which borders Mauritania to the north.—AFP