The case was moved to a recently built conference centre and the world's press, normally excluded from the country, given access. On Tuesday, the trial was suspended until the alleged role of Sir Mark and a number of other accused coup supporters abroad can be explored. The judge said yesterday it would resume in 30 days but Mr Obiang summoned the foreign press for what turned out to be little more than an opportunity for him to be photographed giving them an audience. The men on trial, he said, were "individuals without morals who attempted a crime against our country which would have resulted in blood being spilt".The journalists would have welcomed the opportunity to ask the President about his own reputation for spilling blood.

Since he deposed and killed his despotic uncle, Macias Nguema 25 years ago - opinion varies on whether he pulled the trigger himself - his opponents charge him with having had several enemies disposed of. But in Equatorial Guinea, unaccustomed to world attention, the alleged involvement of internationally known figures in a conspiracy against it is more exciting than anything else that has happened since the Spanish loosened their colonial grip in the 1960s.Not only is there an English lord whose book sales outstrip even those of Frederick Forsyth, but the Iron Lady herself is now reported to have put up bail for her son, who has been under house arrest in Cape Town on suspicion of having helped to finance the plot.Even Equatorial Guinea's President, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, appears to have been caught up by the mood. At night, the horizon glows red; here and there a pinpoint of flame pierces the darkness. These are the flares of the offshore platforms which have transformed Equatorial Guinea into sub-Saharan Africa's third-largest oil exporter.When Forsyth was writing, there was little to lure soldiers of fortune to this tropical dictatorship, which consists of a few, lush, volcanic islands and a jungle-covered strip of the African mainland. Its population of 500,000 subsisted mainly on cocoa exports, so the novelist, who rechristened the country Zangoro, endowed it with valuable deposits of platinum.

But the oil is real enough, and it appears to have attracted a band of adventurers who imagined that the 1970s had never gone away.Languishing since March in the island's Black Beach prison are eight former members of South Africa's apartheid-era special forces, six Armenian aircrew and five local men. When Frederick Forsyth was looking for a suitable setting in which to write The Dogs of War, his 1974 thriller about white mercenaries in Africa, he chose this island capital. They are accused of being the advance guard for a coup planned by Simon Mann, a former SAS officer turned mercenary soldier, allegedly supported by his friend Sir Mark Thatcher, Lord Archer and his friend Ely Calil, a Lebanese-born oil trader based in London, who is said to have commissioned the whole operation.He is said to have wanted to put Severo Moto, an exiled Equatorial Guinea opposition politician, in power in exchange for favourable oil deals.Apart from Mr Mann, who is in Zimbabwe awaiting sentence for illegally attempting to buy arms, all have denied having anything to do with the affair. Beneath green-draped volcanic slopes, 200-year-old Spanish cannon still guard the palm-fringed harbour and the damp-stained shopfronts. An air of "malarial lethargy", VS Naipaul's phrase, still prevails. But look out to sea from the terrace of the Bahia Hotel, where Eddie the Eel practised in the comma-shaped swimming pool, one of only two on the island, for his moment of glory at the Sydney Olympics, and there is a sight Forsyth would not have seen. That was three decades ago but not much has changed in Malabo since.