A faction of the Mauritanian army today announced that it had ousted the country's pro-Western president in a military coup.

President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya was away from the desperately poor West African country attending the funeral of King Fahd in Saudi Arabia when the military acted, taking control of key buildings in Nouakchott, the capital city.

Gunfire was heard as the rebel soldiers took over the military headquarters, and the offices of state television and radio. The airport was closed.

Later, state television broadcast a statement signed by a so-called Military Council for Justice and Democracy, which said that it intended to rule the country with a military junta for the next two years until elections could be held.

"The armed forces and security forces have unanimously decided to put an end to the totalitarian practices of the deposed regime under which our people have suffered so much over the last several years," the statement said.

"This council pledges before the Mauritanian people to create favourable conditions for an open and transparent democracy."

There have been three previous coup attempts in Mauritania since 2003. The incentives to seize control of the previously peaceful country have increased as Western oil companies are due to start extracting its large offshore reserves of oil for the first time in the spring of 2006.

Oil wealth, though, has exacerbated political tensions and led to power struggles elsewhere in Africa.

There was confusion in Nouakchott. "We have heard that there has been a coup d’etat but we don’t know who’s involved. We don’t know whether it is something that has succeeded or failed," Sid Ahmed Abeidna, the British honorary consul, told Reuters.

The French embassy said that it was monitoring the situation in the former colony but declined to comment further. The US embassy said that it had told its citizens to stay at home.

A witness on the border with Senegal said that border guards were preventing people from leaving the country. Shops in the city were closed and taxis were not stopping to pick up people trying to leave the town centre.

"I heard a burst of gunfire near the presidency. I saw scared people running away. Civil servants have all left their offices," a witness in the capital told Reuters. He said state radio had been off air since the early morning.

"All the army is in the streets. It’s blocking the roads to the presidency and the main routes through town," said a civil servant who lives near the presidency building.

Mr Taya was tonight said to be in Niamey, the capital of neighbouring Niger, where he had stopped on the way back from King Fahd's funeral in Riyadh.

Mr Taya seized power in 1984 in a coup, and later won two
elections that the opposition has either boycotted or accused of being rigged. Analysts have warned that his attempts to stifle opposition groups by denouncing them as terrorists risks backfiring by radicalising moderate Islamists.

Violence and political turmoil have taken their toll on Mauritania's economy, but conditions for its citizens have improved under Mr Taya. Access to primary health care has gone from 30 percent in 1990 to about 70 percent in 2001. Primary school enrolment rates increased from 49 percent in 1987 to 88 percent in 2001.

In recent years he has allied his overwhelmingly Muslim nation with the United States in the war on terror - a shift from 1991, when he condemned the US-led coalition that ousted Saddam Hussein’s soldiers from Kuwait. The policy shift has angered Arabs, who make up a sizeable proportion of the population.

Since then, Mauritania has become one of only three of the 22 Arab League member states to have established diplomatic ties with Israel. It is also one of the most repressive countries in the region towards Islamist movements, analysts say.

Dissident soldiers came close to toppling him in June 2003 during two days of street fighting in Nouakchott, before loyalist forces regained control. The government says it foiled two more coup attempts in 2004.

Police have arrested scores of Islamic opposition leaders and activists since April, accusing them of colluding with the Algerian-based Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a violent rebel movement allied to al Qaeda. In May, security forces searched mosques around the capital, seizing Koranic texts and arresting mosque officials.

The United States has been sending military experts to train soldiers in Mauritania and eight other countries in the region, to combat militants thought to be operating in the Sahara. Fifteen Mauritanian soldiers were killed in a dawn raid on a remote outpost near the Algerian border in June, an attack which the government blamed on the GSPC.

US European Command, which overseas US military operations in 91 countries and territories in Europe and most of Africa, said that it was monitoring the situation closely.

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