There were riots in various parts of The Gambia on Wednesday, concentrated around the Senegambia area, following the death of a Sierra Leonean.
It led to the torching of the residence of the head of the police Anti-Crime Unit, Gorgi Mboob.
The protesters, in their hundreds and mostly Gambian, accuse the police of beating to death, Usman Dabor, a Sierra Leonean married to a Gambian wife. His body is lying at the Kanifeng hospital.
The 36-year-old had been detained at the Bijilo Police Station in Senegambia for buying stolen property. He was allegedly beaten and tortured, before being released.
The president of the Sierra Leonean community in The Gambia, known as SLENU, Abdul Wahid Thomas, says the late man was detained for nine days “for simply buying something he never knew was a stolen item”.
Other members of SLENU say the police suspected that he could die in custody after the beating and so decided to release him to be reporting daily.
He would later collapse at the police station during one of those visits, and was rushed to the hospital.
The police have denied any wrongdoing. In a press release signed by their spokesman Assistant Superintendent of Police SP Lamin Njie, they say Dabor was asthmatic as “shown by medical papers tendered by his family which prompted his bail.”
Calling for “calm and restraint”, they say he was named by suspects during investigations into a “Breaking and Stealing” incident at Kerr Serign on 14th July 2019, and that they had “confessed selling [the] items stolen” to Dabor.
The police statement says they visited Dabor’s shop at the Serekunda Market where they recovered a flat screen television, one of the items stolen.
They deny that he was detained for nine days, saying he was held between the 12 and 15 July 2019, before being released on bail with the instruction to be reporting at the police.
Sierra Leone’s High Commissioner in Banjul, Lulu Sheriff, has demanded that an autopsy be carried out before burial. “We will not have him buried until that post-mortem is carried out” she told Politico, concernedly.
There are thousands of Sierra Leoneans living in The Gambia. Many of them are among some of the country’s best teachers. Others went there during the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and never came back, while others await resettlement in a Western country.
© 2019 Politico Online
