Yus, I hereby strongly disagree with your position of exonerating the school teacher from blame for the tragic death of Ebrima Barry, and instead put the blame squarely on the law enforcement officers.This is not only a misconstruction but also negligence on your part to assess the situation that led Poor Ebrima, in the wrong hands, in the first place. The teacher is as culpable as any other individual for the tragic death of a poor school boy striving to make ends meet. You said that there was no way he could forsee the fate of Ebrima. This is another negligent reasoning you brought forward to reason out but you failed to analysed the reason why the teacher did not report him to the headmaster for any disciplinary actions as is usually the case? The reason why he failed to report him to the school authorities and instead choose the fire service and not the police station is for a hidden motive, which the school teacher alone is able to respond to. Any investigations to be conducted, the teacher should be the first to give account why he took Ebrima to the fire service and the instructions therein he gave, if any. With all due respect, with these assertions of yours, are unjust to family and the deceased, who has been denied of his rights to education by a school teacher and right to life, because of hatred and other ill motives. Haruna Farage ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: Re: What happened to Ebrima Barry's teacher ? Author: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list <[log in to unmask]> at Internet Date: 4/7/00 11:19 PM Kibily, I don't think that anyone can blame the teacher for the tragic series ofevents that happened after Ebrima was handed over to the law. He had no way of foreseeing what was to happen next, and no disrespect to the deceased, but thereare circumstances when the law has to be called to control unruly students. The real culprits here are the law enforcement authorities and the people that have tried to cover-up this atrocious crime. The law enforcement authorities and, mo re recently, the army have always had a reputation of being extremely cruel to s uspects, whether guilty or not. I vividly remember the late Sgt. Kujabi repeate dly head butting and slapping suspects as his method of interrogation. Usually the suspect would confess immediately just out of fear for his or her own life. I witnessed grown men getting whipped by overzealous police officers and also heard stories about cases where the suspects were shocked with live electric wires . To make the issue worse, J! ! awara disbanded the field force and formed the GNA, and they too started to viol ate the human rights of the average Gambian. Just based on this brief history, one can clearly see that the problem is a human rights issue and average Gambian 's apathy towards this alarming trend. No one deserves to be beaten, tortured o r killed without a fair trial in a court of law. What irks me the most is the ambiguity of the autopsy report that is published i n the Independent newspaper. This is an excerpt from the report that describes the official cause of death: Quote On the Cause of Death, the report cites 'Infaret of the right lung located in th e middle lobe and base with severe hemorrhagic necrosis. Severe edema of both l ungs. Acute respiratory insufficiency, Hepatic esteatosis.' Unquote As you can see, one has to be a doctor to figure out what the cause of death is.I even tried using a dictionary to look for the meanings of infaret and estatotis. The language used to describe the cause of death was not put in layman's ter ms simply because someone wants to cover up what transpired. The time has come when we to confront these human rights abuses. We can no long er afford to sit back and watch while the humans rights of innocent civilians ar e being infringed upon by the very people that are supposed to protect us. The news media should stop regurgitating these verbatim reports from official source s, and instead start launching their own investigative reports. Independent, ar e you listening? In addition, we the Gambian public should abandon this "laisse z-faire" attitude and start being more vigilant about these abuses. Perhaps andindependent, non biased investigative team should be started to investigate reports of abuses by the military, and also to figure out ways of curbing this distu rbing trend. In the meantime, God bless our beloved country. Yus ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------