Ailing president returns

The Presidential convoy on the way from Abuja airport

Three months after leaving Nigeria to receive medical treatment for a heart condition, President Umaru Yar’Adua shocked the nation by returning home in the early hours of today. A patient at the King Faisal hospital in Jeddah for 92 days, Mr. Yar’Adua was finally removed from his bed on Tuesday and taken aboard an Abuja bound flight at about 2100 Saudi time.

Two planes, one of them an air ambulance, landed in the presidential wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport in Abuja within ten minutes of each other and it is believed that the president was on board the first one which landed at 0145 hours.

A presidential convoy, including the Ford intensive care ambulance, was at the airport waiting to meet him. It is doubtful if the president has recovered from his illness and sources at the airport were unable to confirm what kind of condition he was in when he landed. Soldiers prevented journalists from going anywhere near the aircraft and the homecoming was without ceremony.

An airport employee who works as a ground staff said quite unusually, the planes disembarked at a secluded part of the runway.

“That is not where they normally land even when it is a presidential flight,“ he said. “The place they landed is as if they don’t want anybody to see them at all.”

The floodlights on the tarmac were also dimmed in the section the planes landed which made it difficult to make out the figures that alighted from the planes. It appeared though that Mr. Yar’Adua was moved directly into the ambulance.

There had been some signs that the president was returning to the country.