The Gambia Journal (Banjul)
OPINION
May 4, 2006
Posted to the web May 4, 2006
By Mohammed L. Sillah & Mbaye B. Sarr
Where are the five allegedly escaped detainees suspected of involvement in the alleged attempted coup of March 21st? It is now getting to a month since the five men, including former NIA Director General Daba Marenah and Captain Ebou Lowe and other military officers were said to have escaped while being transferred to another prison in the provinces over two hundred kilometers away. Few believed the story when it was first broadcasted over state-owned electronic media.
The need to transfer the men from the Banjul Central Prisons just a week after their arrest, when investigators were supposed to be at the heat of their work, to the remote and intractable Janjanbureh Prisons seemed to have made many to smell something fishy. The media reported the case of the alleged escape only once. Many figured out that if the escape was indeed true, state media would have been repeating the broadcast many more times to ask people to help in the search. Many of the other detainees have not been heard of since their arrest.
Captain Pierre Mendy, former Captain Vincent Jatta and many of the alleged detained plotters are yet to be heard of. All the men are citizens, employed by the state in the name of security for the Gambian people. Now, their families remain in painful limbo. Some of the families have been reported to have been informed by anonymous callers that the men have been secretly executed. Others, who refuse to believe in the dastardly acts, encourage family members of the men that perhaps they are alive and that many that have been freed had been suspected of being killed.
This is not the first time that people have disappeared in our little Gambia. The case of Mr. Foday Makalo is still being recalled. The former APRC Administrative Secretary was said to have escaped after police reported that he had stolen party funds and absconded. A group of armed soldiers went for him in his native Badibou district at the North Bank Division. Since then, people continued to believe that he had been killed. Some claimed that he was killed and buried in a farm owned by Lower Nuimi Chief Alhagie Tabora Manneh, while others say he had been seen in Bamako, the capital of the West African state of Mali. This incident took place in the late 1990s.
Not long after, a military officer and presidential bodyguard, Almamo Manneh, was shot dead by soldiers, official reports said, after resisting arrest. Days later Corporal Dumbuya was hounded and shot dead in the busy Banjul central market. All these came after the murder of the late Secretary of State for Finance Ousman Koro Ceesay in 1995. Dozens of soldiers had earlier disappeared in the November 11th 1994 alleged coup attempt.
Last year, in May of 2005, the bodies of fourteen foreigners, most of them Ghanaians were on a beach side in Tanji. Nobody still knows who killed them though residents of Ghana Town, not far from were the battered bodies were found, said some of them were last seen when members of the PIU (Police Intervention Unit) came to take them away. The catalogue of heinous crimes that many blame on the Jammeh regime continues.
Only citizens can stop it. Citizens, as individuals, in civil society organizations, in mosque and churches, must stand up and asked where the men are.
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