Simon Mann

Simon Francis Mann (26 June 1952 – 8 May 2025) was a British officer in the Special Air Service (SAS), and later a mercenary. He trained to be an officer at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Scots Guards. He later became a member of the SAS, and on leaving the military, he co-founded Sandline International with fellow ex-Scots Guards colonel Tim Spicer in 1996. Sandline operated mostly in Angola and Sierra Leone, but public protests against a contract with the government of Papua New Guinea led to the resignation of the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, in what became known as the Sandline affair.

On 7 March 2004, Mann is alleged to have led the 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup attempt. He was arrested by the Zimbabwe Republic Police at Harare International Airport along with 64 other mercenaries, later describing himself as the "manager, not the architect" of the coup. He eventually served three years of a four-year prison sentence in Zimbabwe before being extradited to Equatorial Guinea, where he served less than two years of a 34+1⁄3-year sentence before being pardoned on humanitarian grounds.