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LAGOS, Nigeria -- Gen. Sani Abacha -- the Nigerian dictator who attracted worldwide condemnation for his hard-line regime and attacks on his country's once-robust press -- died today of a heart attack, family friends said. He was 54.
In his repeated crackdowns on the independent news media in Nigeria, Abacha gained the dubious distinction as one of the leading international enemies of the press. With 21 journalists in prison, Nigeria has jailed more reporters and editors than any country in Africa, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Word of Abacha's death came after heavily armed soldiers sealed off his home and office in the capital, Abuja. Only the country's top military brass were permitted to enter the compound.
In keeping with Muslim practice, a funeral will be within the next 24 hours, Abacha's family said, speaking on condition of anonymity. There was no official government announcement.
Even in a country long battered by hard-line military regimes, Abacha stood out as icy and unforgiving, willing to flout world opinion in his quest for absolute power.
Critics, be they Nobel laureates, former heads of state, or environmental activists, faced certain arrest and sometimes execution if they persisted in challenging Abacha and his military government.
Sani Abacha, born Sept. 20, 1943, in the northern state of Kano, was a career soldier, enrolling in the army as an infantryman at 18 and attending military training colleges in the United Kingdom and United States in addition to Nigeria.
The June 1993 elections were to have returned Nigeria to civilian rule. Although Abacha banned most democratic institutions, he promised a return to civilian government and met with Moshood Abiola, the businessman who had won the aborted 1993 vote.
But Abacha's promises of democratic reforms soon proved hollow.
When Abiola, frustrated over his stolen victory, marked the 1993 election's first anniversary by declaring himself president in defiance of Abacha, he was jailed on treason charges.
Elections that were to have given the country a civilian government in 1996 never materialized, and Abacha announced he was stretching his rule until the end of 1998.
Other arrests soon followed, among them former military ruler Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo and 50 others accused of plotting a coup and sentenced after a secret tribunal to terms ranging from 15 years to life.
Wole Soyinka, the winner of the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, slipped out of Nigeria in November 1994, saying the country was "retreating into the Dark Ages." Abacha charged him in absentia with treason, a crime punishable by death.
But no act drew such public condemnation as the Nov. 10, 1995, hanging of environmentalist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other political activists convicted in a closed military tribunal of murdering political opponents.
Critics said the charges were false, Abacha's revenge for Saro-Wiwa's constant challenges to the military government and his criticisms of the environmental damage wrought by the oil industry.
The brazen brutality of the act stunned the world, coming even as the Commonwealth and South African President Nelson Mandela appealed for mercy. In response, the 53-member Commonwealth took the unprecedented step of suspending Nigeria, and Mandela called for international sanctions against Nigerian oil, which accounts for more than 80% of its foreign currency earnings.
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