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SA not in Ivory Coast army ...
Paris - The office of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo denied on Thursday that South African mercenaries were fighting alongside his country's army to put down a six-week-old bloody rebellion.
"No credit should be given to rumours about any supposed presence of South African mercenaries in Ivory Coast," Gbagbo's communications adviser, Toussaint Alain, said in a statement.
"These fantasy allegations, put about by a western military source and the armed rebels, essentially aims to torpedo the Lome negotiations and to place responsibility, in advance, for any failure of the peace talks on President Gbagbo," the statement said.
Ivory Coast rebel leaders on Thursday began discussing their main demands with government negotiators at a meeting in the Togolese capital Lome in a bid to restore a fragile peace process.
Alain was responding to an allegation made on Tuesday by the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies that around 40 mercenaries, many of them South African, had been hired by Gbagbo to help him quash the rebellion and that another 160 were on their way. - Sapa-AFP