a state prosecutor in Mauritania requested the death penalty for...

a state prosecutor in Mauritania requested the death penalty for the alleged ringleader of three attempted coup plots as well as for 16 accused accomplices. The prosecutor, who made his recommendations to a court in the West African country, also asked for three opposition leaders to be jailed for five years, accusing them of having bankrolled the coup attempts. 
Among the three politicians is Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla, a former military ruler who was the main challenger to President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya in a 2003 election.
A total of 195 people, most of them from the military, were on trial in the coup-prone Islamic republic, a poor, mostly desert country hoping to get rich from the recent discovery of offshore oil.
Their alleged ringleader, former army officer Saleh Ould Hanenna, came close to toppling Taya in June 2003 during two days of street fighting in the capital Nouakchott, before the president's loyalists regained control.
Mauritania's government says it foiled two more coup attempts in 2004 by dissidents linked to Hanenna, who was arrested in October 2004. Nine of the people for whom the death penalty had been requested -- all suspected members of a group of renegade soldiers calling itself "Knights of Change" -- were at large.