Authorities in Malabo put 19 accused coup plotters on trial last month, but it was suspended after the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was arrested in South Africa on suspicion of helping to bankroll them.

The new twist made headlines around the world, but in Equatorial Guinea, a country with no daily newspaper or independent media, the case was mainly discussed in hushed tones when people were sure there were no strangers within earshot.

"This is a quiet country. All these soldiers in the street, it's only to intimidate the population," muttered Recaredo Silebo Buturu, an unusually outspoken 25-year-old, as an open-top truck packed with armed men in camouflage gear went by.

"The soldiers are nervous and they make us nervous," he said, hunching over a fruit juice to avoid being overheard in a slick new coffee shop that has sprung up since the oil boom.

It's nothing new for residents of Malabo to be on edge. In "Tropical Gangsters," a book on Equatorial Guinea in the 1980s by then World Bank economist Robert Klitgaard, the index has a separate entry for "paranoia."

"People will denounce you to the police if they see you do anything unusual ... There's a lot of distrust in our society," said Buturu.

"SOMEONE'S ALWAYS WATCHING YOU"

A former Spanish colony with between 500,000 and a million inhabitants, Equatorial Guinea is split between a mountainous jungle mainland and lush volcanic islands off the western coast of central Africa. The capital is on the biggest of the islands.

Malabo is a town of faded charm, the yellow paint peeling off its arcaded colonial buildings, with a palm-lined seafront on the edge of a curved black cliff dropping straight into a natural deep-water harbor.

It inspired bestselling author Frederick Forsyth, staying at a Malabo hotel in the 1970s, to write "Dogs of War," a tale of mercenaries trying to overthrow the president of a tiny African state - though in the novel the prize was platinum, not oil.

The setting is beautiful but there is a stifling atmosphere that is not only due to the heavy, low clouds that hang over Malabo most of the time during the rainy season, hiding the 9,850-foot volcano that looms above the town.

"It's all the guys with guns, and the feeling someone's always watching you, and the stories you hear about people who got shot for driving through a roadblock or locked up for taking a photo," said an American working for an oil services company.

In Equatorial Guinea's first decade of independence, the bloodthirsty rule of Francisco Macias Nguema drove away about a third of the population and ravaged the economy.

Macias's nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, deposed the dictator and had him executed in 1979 in what the state calls the "freedom coup." Obiang has held power ever since.

Long ignored by the rest of the world in his isolated stronghold, he has been courted by foreign firms and governments since the extraction of crude oil propelled Equatorial Guinea to be the third biggest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa.

Oil has brought greater visibility to Equatorial Guinea and the government has come under increased international pressure to improve what human rights groups say is a long record of widespread abuses - but change has been painfully slow.

UBIQUITOUS LEADER

Equatorial Guinea adopted a constitution in 1991 ushering in multi-party politics, but international observers say only lip-service has been paid to democracy.