The man widely believed to have won Nigeria's last democratic election, Moshood Abiola, died of a heart attack yesterday after collapsing in front of a delegation sent from Washington to win his freedom from jail.
His death came less than a month after the equally dramatic death of his jailer, the military dictator Sani Abacha - also said officially to have died of cardiac arrest. There were reports last night of panic in parts of Lagos, the country's main city.
Witnesses said people screamed and shouted in the central business district, and many rushed as evening fell to get to their homes as soon as possible.
US administration officials said last night that Chief Abiola started coughing heavily in the presence of the Under-Secretary of Political Affairs, Mr Thomas Pickering, and Ms Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. The Americans called a doctor and Abiola was taken to a clinic where he died.
To calm opposition fears of murder, the state department in Washington rushed out a statement confirming the Nigerian regime's version of events: "We have no reason to believe anything other than natural causes."
The regime said a post-mortem would be held if Abiola's family permitted it. But one of his daughters immediately accused the army of murdering her father - who spent four years in detention - and some opposition leaders said Abiola's death was suspiciously convenient for Nigeria's military administration.
Mr Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, said in a statement last night: "Chief Abiola had been a symbol of democracy in Nigeria. It is therefore particularly tragic that he should die now at a time of change and hope."
The visit by Mr Pickering was the latest in a stream of high-level delegations to meet Abiola in the past fortnight as part of a growing international effort to press the country's latest military regime to restore civilian government.
The United Nations secretary-general, Mr Kofi Annan, emerged from meetings with both Abiola and the government, confident that the winner of the country's 1993 election would soon be freed. But he also said Abiola was realistic enough to realise he could not continue to claim the presidency. It was his decision to lay claim to the presidency in 1994 that caused Abacha to jail him.
But a Commonwealth delegation that also met Abiola said he was refusing to sign a declaration renouncing his election victory.
Although still widely supported in his Yoruba homeland in south-eastern Nigeria, Abiola had long lost support in much of the rest of the country and was a deeply divisive figure. He was also reported to have become increasingly disoriented and out of touch with reality.
He had further divided opponents of the military, and his own family, by apparently - and in contrast to the Commonwealth group's impression - renouncing his claim to the presidency. It was an open secret that he was desperate to win his release.
But Abiola's decision to walk away from the 1993 election was widely viewed as a betrayal of a principle which could have been used to force concessions from the military.
Even so, he represented the primary symbol of democracy for many Nigerians and opposition groups. Many will be shocked by the timing of his death, coming as freedom looked imminent. It is also likely to elevate Abiola to a martyrdom among some Nigerians that he could not have hoped for had he lived.