BISSAU, June 5 Guinea-Bissau's interior ministry said on Friday they had foiled a coup plot, government soldiers having shot three current and former government ministers accused of involvement.

An ministry statement said that former defence minister Helder Proenca had masterminded the coup bid and that territorial administration minister Baciro Dabo had also also involved.

Both men had been gunned down in the early hours, it said.

Former prime minister Faustino Fudut Imbali was also shot dead, according to a hospital source once the body had been identified.

“We have information of a coup attempt that would have been carried out by a group of political officials”, including Dabo and Proenca, said a ministry statement.

Proenca was killed “in an exchange of gunfire between security men sent to arrest him and members of his personal guard,” two of whom also died, the ministry said.

“It was during an attempted arrest, which Baciro Dabo is reported to have resisted, that he was killed by members of the armed forces who came to arrest him,” an official statement said.

One of Dabo's bodyguards, who was injured by the soldiers, said that about 30 troops arrived on two vehicles, beat up the security detail and shot their way into the minister's bedroom.

A hospital source said that the bodies of Imbali, Dabo and Proenca had been brought in, with those of one of Proenca's bodyguards and his chauffeur, all shot up.

Baciro Dabo, who was minister for terrorial administration and a candidate in a presidential election due on June 28, was shot dead in his bedroom in the early hours. Proenca and Dabo were members of the ruling African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), once the single party in the small west African state.

The interior ministry listed nine suspects allegedly members of a “high command of republican forces for the restoration of constitutional order and democracy” led by Proenca.

In recent years the poor country has achieved notoriety as a transit point for the cocaine trade between South America and Europe, raising the stakes in power feuds between political and military leaders.

According to the ministry, the plotters aimed to “physically eliminate” Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior and the acting military chief of staff, naval commander Jose Zamora Induta.—AFP