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Challenges to the Regime The SRC announced on two
occasions that it had discovered plotters in the act of initiating coup
attempts. Both instances involved SRC members. In April 1970, Qoorsheel, the
first vice president, was arrested and charged with treason. Qoorsheel
represented the more conservative police and army elements and thus opposed
the socialist orientation of the majority of SRC members. He was convicted
of treason in a trial before the National
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Court and sentenced to a prison term. In May 1971, the second vice
president, Major General Mahammad Ainanche, and a fellow SRC member,
Soviet-trained Lieutenant Colonel Salah Gaveire Kedie, who had served as
head of the Ministry of Defense and later as secretary of state for
communications, were arrested along with several other army officers for
plotting Siad Barre's assassination. The conspirators, who had sought the
support of clans that had lost influence in the 1969 overthrow of the
democratic regime, appeared to have been motivated by personal rivalries
rather than by ideology. Accused of conspiring to assassinate the president,
the two key figures in the plot and another army officer were executed after
a lengthy trial. By 1974 the SRC felt sufficiently secure to release
Qoorsheel and most of the leaders of the democratic regime who had been
detained since the 1969 coup. Igaal and four other former ministers were
excepted from the amnesty, however, and were sentenced to long prison terms.
Igaal received thirty years for embezzlement and 
