By Tansa Musa

YAOUNDE, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Cameroonian authorities have detained two police officers accused of kidnapping a political refugee and handing him over to neighbouring Equatorial Guinea, where he faces a 30-year jail sentence, a police official said.

The two police officers detained were accused of kidnapping Cipriano Nguema Mba, on Oct. 8 and driving him to Equatorial Guinea's embassy in Yaounde, the official said.

He was Equatorial Guinea's former army paymaster and was registered with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Yaounde, where he had been granted political asylum, the official said.

"We've had no news of him since he was abducted. We don't even know whether he is alive or dead," the official told Reuters in Cameroon's capital Yaounde late on Friday.

Staff at Equatorial Guinea's embassy in Yaounde, and at the UNHCR office in the city declined to comment on Mba's case.

Mba was one of 23 people sentenced to 12-30 years in jail for their role in an alleged 2004 coup plot against President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in a trial branded unfair by London-based Amnesty International.

Mba, accused of being the ringleader of the plot, was also accused of absconding with money meant to pay soldiers in 2003.

Amnesty said at the time all but two of the defendants had stated in court that they had been tortured in detention and some still bore visible marks, including one man who had to be carried in and out of court as he was unable to walk.

Amnesty International also said then that it had information that two other defendants convicted in absentia had been abducted from nearby Benin and Nigeria and secretly incarcerated at Black Beach prison in Equatorial Guinea's capital Malabo.

ANONYMOUS CALLS

Cameroon's independent daily "Le Jour" reported on Friday that Mba had received anonymous phone calls and been trailed by suspected members of Equatorial Guinea's secret service.

Quoting a Spanish media report, it said Mba had asked Cameroonian authorities for additional security as a result.

The alleged October 2004 plot was overshadowed by a higher-profile failed coup plot earlier in March 2004 for which dozens of international mercenaries were jailed in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe.

Former British special forces officer Simon Mann was jailed in Equatorial Guinea for 34 years last July over that plot, after several years in jail in Zimbabwe on related charges.

Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, pleaded guilty in South Africa in 2005 to charges linked with the plot, though he said he did not know about it.

President Nguema has ruled Equatorial Guinea, which straddles a portion of mainland Africa and the Gulf of Guinea island of Bioko, since he seized power in a 1979 coup in which the previous president, his uncle, was killed.

The poor and long-decaying former Spanish colony has seen a flood of foreign investment since oil was found in the 1990s. It is now sub-Saharan Africa's third biggest oil producer with one of the world's highest economic growth rates in recent years. (Writing by Alistair Thomson; Editing by Sami Aboudi)

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