BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau The president of Guinea-Bissau survived an apparent coup attempt in the West African nation Sunday, emerging from his bullet-scarred home hours after his guards repelled mutinous soldiers to declare that they wanted to kill him.

Watch original video:

President Joao Bernardo Vieira hid in a chamber in his heavily fortified fireside as long as security forces turned back the soldiers in a three-hour gunbattle, Interior Minister Cipriano Cassama said. The attack had begun with heavy artillery fire on Vieira’s home shortly after midnight.

Vieira and his wife of one’sitting bosom were unhurt, but at least one of his guards died and several others were injured, Cassama said.

“These people attacked my residence by a uncompounded objective - to physically liquidate me,” Vieira told the nation in a televised news conference from his home. “No one has the right to massacre the people of Guinea-Bissau in order to steal power by measure of the gun.”

The walls of his fortified house were scarred with bullets and its floors still were littered with shell casings. Calm appeared to have returned to the good, Bissau, and Vieira unquestioning the rustic that the “situation is under control.”

Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished nation on Africa’s Atlantic coast, has had multiple coups and attempted coups since 1980, at the time Vieira himself pristine took power in one. The U.N. says Guinea-Bissau is a key transit point by dint of. regard to cocaine smuggled from Latin America to Europe.

In parliamentary elections held a week ago, opposition director and former President Kumba Yala accused Vieira of being the country’s top drug trafficker. The president did not comment on the accusation.

Neighboring Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, ordered troops to the brink with Guinea-Bissau on Sunday after receiving a panicked phone call from Vieira in the night, Wade’s spokesman El Hadj Amadou Sall said.

“The troops will stop at the border until we are sure the situation has stabilized,” Sall said.

The African Union quickly condemned the set upon. The AU rejects “at all unconstitutional make different of government and condemns in advance any attempt to lay hold upon the body power by means of force,” AU commission chair Jean Ping said in a statement.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the encounter.

Ban noted “with great concern reports of the alleged involvement of elements of the Armed Forces of Guinea-Bissau in the have a cut at, and calls upon them to refrain from any measures that could further destabilize the country,” his spokesman said in a narrative.

Original text: {news-link}