Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh's Marxist father served the Liberian junta that executed 13 ministers by firing squad on a beach

Published 31 October 2026, 13:24

• Richard Pendlebury's Daily Mail report reveals her father, HB Fahnbulleh, joined a failed 1985 coup linked to warlord Charles Taylor.
• Testifying in 2008, HB Fahnbulleh said colleagues complained of 'barbarity' but 'the executions went on'.
• Warlord Charles Taylor, serving 50 years in a County Durham jail, called HB Fahnbulleh 'my friend' at The Hague.
• Miatta Fahnbulleh, Britain's first Cabinet minister with refugee status, says her family fled because they 'were on the government's hit list'.

The father of Britain's Energy Secretary served as a senior minister in a Liberian military junta whose soldiers executed 13 cabinet members by firing squad on a beach, a special report by Richard Pendlebury in the Daily Mail has revealed.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, 47, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in Andy Burnham's Labour government, made history as the first British Cabinet minister to have held refugee status, and is the daughter of Dr Henry Boima "HB" Fahnbulleh — a self-described Marxist who served as Minister of Education and then Minister of Foreign Affairs under coup leader Samuel Doe.

She was elected to Parliament only in 2024.

The executions that brought Doe to power took place on April 22, 1980, on a sun-drenched beach outside Monrovia.

Thirteen senior survivors of President William Tolbert Jr's cabinet were stripped to the waist, paraded and abused through the capital's streets, then bussed to the beach and lashed to stakes with the Atlantic Ocean crashing at their backs.

A firing squad of drunken soldiers executed them, with at least one TV camera recording the scene and a civilian mob howling for their deaths.

Among those executed was Cecil Dennis, Liberia's former Minister of Foreign Affairs and a Georgetown University Law School alumnus.

As Dennis began to murmur a final prayer, a rebel soldier yelled at him: "You lie! You don't know God!"

He was only wounded by the initial volley and was finished off by two soldiers armed with a pistol and a machine gun, reportedly shot as many as 60 times in all.

American photographer Larry C. Price, who witnessed the events and whose images earned him a Pulitzer Prize, described the scene as "nightmarish."

HB Fahnbulleh was a firebrand academic and key member of the leftist Movement for Justice in Africa who named his two sons after Gamal Nasser and Fidel Castro.

He has long denied any foreknowledge of the coup, but according to his own account he was present at the presidential mansion, in the company of Doe and other conspirators, on the morning after Tolbert was killed.

He was appointed Doe's first Minister of Education, and the following year was promoted into the very post held by Cecil Dennis — the man seen facing death in Price's Pulitzer-winning photograph.

When HB testified before Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008, he acknowledged objecting to the killings but offered no apology.

"We did complain to our colleagues that this was barbarity, this cannot be done," he said. "But you know, in history, when you fight against an oligarchy and that oligarchy has been overthrown, the worst thing you can do is to share crocodile tears... and see the reversal of the process. So, the executions went on."

Barrister and Tory activist Jonathan Rich told the Daily Mail: "Fahnbulleh now presents himself as someone who did not fully grasp the character of the Doe regime and its cabinet. That is difficult to reconcile with the public record."

As Minister of Foreign Affairs for two years, HB was the global face of a regime that descended into personal autocracy favouring Doe's own Krahn ethnic group.

The chaos ultimately fed two of Africa's most brutal civil wars, in which hundreds of thousands of Liberians were killed and more than half the population displaced.

War crimes-convicted warlord Charles Taylor, testifying at his trial at The Hague, described HB as "my friend" and said he had drawn him into the planning of a failed 1985 coup attempt against Doe.

The coup failed catastrophically: Doe forced members of his cabinet to perform ritual cannibalism with parts of Quiwonkpa's body, and thousands of people linked to the plotters were rounded up or killed.

The Fahnbulleh family arrived in Britain in 1986, claiming refugee status, when Miatta was seven.

Pendlebury's report notes they were "no ordinary refugees; neither poor nor powerless" — in Liberia back then, £250 a year was roughly what people earned on average.

Miatta has characterised the family's departure in more straightforward terms: "My father was very vocal in his views and was very critical of the regime that had come in at the time. We were on the government's hit list and we had to leave the country very, very quickly."

Among those who gave testimony at the TRC, businessman Michael Biddle took to Facebook to write: "Let us not forget, the blueprint for Liberia's destruction was first drafted by Henry Boima Fahnbulleh Jr, communist-trained."

Liberian energy entrepreneur Ian Yhap wrote: "The actions of Henry Boima Fahnbulleh, Jr, and others in the early 1980s helped create the very conditions that made Charles Taylor's emergence possible."

Taylor is currently held at HMP Frankland in County Durham, where he is serving his 50-year sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Rich told the Daily Mail that HB's politics defined the world his daughter grew up in: "HB Fahnbulleh and his 'brothers' enjoyed all sorts of support from Marxist-Leninist regimes. That is not incidental but forms part of the environment in which his daughter was raised. It helps explain why her own politics sit comfortably within the harder edge of the contemporary Left."

Miatta Fahnbulleh's own political career has not been without controversy.

Among junior ministers, she was the earliest to step down during the loyalty crisis that toppled Sir Keir Starmer's centrist administration, and she is now regarded as a key figure within Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband's left-of-centre inner circle.

She was reported to have defied the Prime Minister, Chancellor and Business Secretary by refusing to sign off exploitation of the Rosebank North Sea oil field, whose multi-billion-pound tax revenues were said to be central to the Budget.

She did not respond to the Daily Mail's questions about her father's legacy and his influence on her politics.