As the Togolese football team returns home after attacks that killed two team officials and injured several, Angola faces tough questions over tournament security and a suddenly visible insurgency.

After withdrawing from the tournament the Togo football team arrived home on Monday. In the Togolese capital, Lomé, RNW West Africa correspondent Bram Posthumus says people crowding in front of newsstands are still in shock over the incident and holding heated discussions on two main questions.

“Should they have come back and should they not have continued playing in Angola? Opinion is divided on that. And the second question is, why on Earth did the authorities allow that team to go, on a bus, into what is effectively a war zone in Angola?”

Both at fault
In Angola, meanwhile, authorities have arrested two people over the shootout in the northern province of Cabinda where the Togolese team bus was traveling on Friday.

A faction of the little known separatist rebel group FLEC, the Forces for the Liberation of the State of Cabinda, claimed responsibility for the attack. Questions are now being asked about the wisdom of letting the Togolese team travel by road in the region.

Togo and Angola are playing the blame game, but both sides were negligent, says Alex Vine, an Africa analyst at the think tank Chatham House in London.

“I think the Togolese are partly to fault in their lack of risk appraisal and the Angolan authorities are certainly at fault for having allowed a land journey to take place.”

 
Complacent
The Angolan government may have underestimated the threat presented by FLEC, which Mr Vine says is a low-intensity insurgency created in the 1960s.

“The Angolan authorities have been a bit complacent – last year they announced that FLEC was a spent force, that the separatist threat was over. That’s not been the case: the last couple of years … there’s been abduction of foreign nationals [and] there was a killing in 2008 of an individual working for a British oil company prospecting in the north of Cabinda.”

One of the problems facing the government in tackling FLEC, says Mr Vine, is that the organisation is split into disparate factions.

“The northern faction has for many years been a minor irritant, and they obviously have drawn attention to their cause by this attack on the Togolese football team.”

Rodrigues Mingas, FLEC Secretary General, told France24 television on Monday the attack was targeting Angolan security forces and not the Togolese football team. The organisation has vowed to continue its insurgency.