ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Six people accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu were arraigned in court on Wednesday on charges of treason and terrorism.
All six pleaded not guilty to all 13 charges, which were announced on Tuesday. The suspects have been in the custody of the secret police for months.
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FILE - President of Nigeria Bola Ahmed Tinubu speaks to the media ahead of his meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer inside 10 Downing Street in London, Thursday, March 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, Pool File)
Retired Major Gen. Mohammed Ibrahim Gana, accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, arrives at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, Wednesday, April 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
People accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu arrive at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, Wednesday, April 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
People accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu arrive at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, Wednesday, April 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
The six included a retired major general and a serving police inspector. A seventh suspect, former Bayelsa state Gov. Timipre Sylva, is accused of helping to conceal the plot and is still at large.
The court adjourned the case until April 27, when it will hear bail applications.
In the charge sheet, authorities said the suspects “conspired with one another to levy war against the state to overawe the president of the Federal Republic.”
The Nigerian government first said it had foiled a coup attempt in January, when it announced that several military officers would stand trial.
The coup would have ended nearly three decades of democratic rule in Africa's most populous country, which returned to democracy in 1999.
FILE - President of Nigeria Bola Ahmed Tinubu speaks to the media ahead of his meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer inside 10 Downing Street in London, Thursday, March 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, Pool File)
Retired Major Gen. Mohammed Ibrahim Gana, accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, arrives at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, Wednesday, April 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
People accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu arrive at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, Wednesday, April 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
People accused of plotting to overthrow Nigerian President Bola Tinubu arrive at the federal high court in Abuja, Nigeria, Wednesday, April 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Gbemiga Olamikan)
NEW YORK (AP) — To the cheers and applause of thousands of BookCon attendees, “Heated Rivalry” author Rachel Reid and director-screenwriter Jacob Tierney walked on to the main event stage at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center. The two Canadians have been international celebrities for just a few months, and still find themselves wondering if all the noise is for someone else.
“We don’t really get to experience this kind of energy and fandom in person very often,” Tierney told The Associated Press just after their joint appearance, a highlight of the weekend gathering of (mostly) young book fans. “It’s been a bit more of an amorphous online thing.”
Since the first episode of “Heated Rivalry” dropped last November, Tierney's adaptation of Reid's “Game Changer” series featuring star-crossed hockey greats Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov has become a phenomenon that boosted the sport's popularity, made Reid a leader of the thriving genre of sports romance fiction and made Olympic torchbearers out of lead actors Hudson Williams (Shane) and Connor Storrie (Ilya). Tierney expects to begin filming the second season this summer, based in part on the second of Reid's novels about Shane and Ilya, “The Long Game.” The author, meanwhile, is working on a third Shane and Ilya book, “Unrivaled.” Both are scheduled for 2027 releases.
“Heated Rivalry” fans know well the story of how the HBO Max show was born, and of Reid's jarring swing from despair to exhilaration. In August 2023, she learned that she had early onset Parkinson's disease. Days later, she received an Instagram message from a man she had never met, but would soon change her life in a very different way: Tierney.
The 46-year-old Tierney is a Montreal native, former child star and award-winning filmmaker whose credits include the TV series “Letterkenny.” In October, Little, Brown and Company will release a collection of Tierney's annotated scripts, “I'll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1.”
Reid, 44, is a longtime hockey fan. Born Rachel Goguen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she chose her pen name for the practical reason that it's easier to pronounce and remember. She's been open about the impact of fame and her health, posting an Instagram announcement in February that she was pushing back the release date of “Unrivaled” from this fall to next summer. Onstage, she acknowledged it had been “tricky” to write since the series took off.
“I'm in a place where the whole world seems to care about what happens next to these characters,” she said. “I'm still determined to stick to what I've always done when I was writing, just kind of pretend I'm writing for me and I hope other people like it.”
During their AP interview, Reid and Tierney spoke of the joy of sex on the page and screen and how Shane and Ilya just won't leave them alone. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
REID: I really like a forbidden romance. I really like the rivals-to-lovers element. I just also like a queer love story with a happy ending. And I really like hockey, so I think there’s just a lot of elements in it that are just very much what I personally would like. I think if this show had come out and had nothing to do with me, I would be obsessed with it still.
TIERNEY: I did not grow up with stories like this. We don’t as gay men, as queer people. We do not get to have happy endings in media very often. I would definitely have watched it (even if he didn't direct it), that’s for sure. I’m sure I would have had notes. I'm a little picky.
TIERNEY: It was a kind of a series of increasingly surreal and overwhelming moments. And by the time the sixth episode aired, it really did feel like we were kind of at the center of a strange maelstrom. But I also was like, “Am I making this up? Is this actually happening?”
REID: I did a bookstore event the day after the trailer came out. They showed the trailer at the event, and everybody in the audience knew every word of the trailer and was saying it along with the trailer. So that was when I was like, “OK, this is going to be nuts.”
REID: Honestly, I love writing them and I’ve never found that to be the difficult part. I think it might be the easiest part for me. I actually really enjoy it. Not to praise myself too much, but I think maybe that’s why people like the scenes. They weren’t hard for me. It’s not a scary thing. It’s not the part that I have to close my eyes and write or anything. It's my favorite part.
TIERNEY: Sex is a language in this show, sex is a way that we watch this couple evolve over the course of a fairly long amount of time in terms of the story, eight years. And so the sex is different every time, a way of watching them evolve both separately and together. I think sex reveals a lot about yourself that you don’t even intend to reveal. And I find that quite fascinating as a storyteller.
REID: Yeah. That’s why I keep writing books about them, because they just keep talking. With other characters, I’ve written the books and they’ve left. But these guys just stick around.
REID: They're fun to write. I love it.
TIERNEY: It's a coloring book now.
REID: It’s 20 pages.
TIERNEY: Don’t tell the truth.
REID: The thing that hasn’t changed is how much fun they are to write. I find their voices very easy to put on the page. More than any other characters I’ve created, they arrived fully formed. They kind of just appeared one day.
REID: There’s a lot of myself in Ilya, for sure. There’s a lot of, kind of hockey player archetypes — the flashy, cocky European superstar, that’s definitely a type. The uptight, very serious good boy-captain. And there’s been plenty of NHL players from decades of hockey. And I’ve been a fan for decades. And obviously there have been some really great rivalries. And we’re getting probably to the end of the (Sidney) Crosby-(Alex) Ovechkin rivalry right now. But that rivalry at its peak was so fun.
REID: A sense of humor, mostly. It's a little bit mean. I also kind of like to use humor to cover up emotions, you know, things like that. I think I also notice things about people a bit, but maybe stay quiet about it.
REID: I told Jacob I wish I had never met them. (Laughing) It is challenge writing without thinking about somebody having to actually say or do what I’m writing, for sure. I’m trying to just block that out. I just need to pretend it definitely will never happen, because I think that’s the only way I can do it.
RR: Yeah. That book will come out June 1. Hell or high water, it's coming out.
Author Rachel Reid poses for a portrait in New York on Saturday, April 18, 2026. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)
Jacob Tierney, left, and Rachel Reid pose for a portrait in New York on Saturday, April 18, 2026. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)
