News

By Umaru Fofana

Police in Sierra Leone on Wednesday night detained the President of the Sierra Leone Football Association, Isha Johansen, her Vice President and the Secretary General.

The three had earlier been picked up and taken to the headquarters of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) in Freetown before they were handed over to the police Criminal Investigations Department (CID).

By Umaru Fofana

Sierra Leone’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) says it has launched an operation codenamed “Operation Thunderbolt” aimed at “routing and bringing to justice fugitive persons alleged to have been involved in corrupt acts and who are of interest” to the agency.

In a press release issued today, the anti-graft agency says a fugitive who fled to neighbouring Guinea in 2013 as he was being sought for an alleged corruption case, is now in detention.

By Kemo Cham

A newspaper editor under investigation for "contempt of parliament" has accused the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) of betrayal.

Moisa Sallu Keikura, editor of the triweekly Future newspaper, was briefly detained by the police Criminal Investigations Department two weeks ago on the orders, he said, of the country’s parliament which accused him of contempt.

He’d angered the House for a letter he wrote to them which they deemed "disrespectful".

By Umaru Fofana 

Twenty Sierra Leoneans have been seized in Sabha, south-western Libya and are being tortured, according to a distress-sounding man who called Politico an hour ago [Wednesday morning] claiming to be one of them.

The caller, Christian Koroma said "we the 14 men are being locked inside a house and our captors are regularly beating us". 

He said the six women were being held elsewhere and implied they could be being raped. 

The head of the police Family Support Unit (FSU) in Sierra Leone, Superintendent Mira Koroma [pictured] leaves the shores of Sierra Leone next week for a year-long training programme in the United States.

She is the first Sierra Leonean to attend the “Next Generation Leaders Program” at the McCain Institute for International Leadership which takes place under the aegis of the Arizona State University. 

Speaking at a farewell meeting with 68 officers of the FSU nationwide, Mira denied rumours that she was leaving the police force.

By Tanu Jalloh

A US-based Sierra Leonean journalist, Aroun Rashid-Deen [pictured] has donated to the Fourah Bay College Mass Communications department 120 cartons of books in the sciences, business and finance, theology, law, sport, media and communication, as well as children’s books.

Mr Rashid-Deen, who works for the Associated Press (AP) in New York, sent the books with support from some of his colleagues at AP.

The Sierra Leone chapter of the global corruption watchdog, Transparency International has issued its second quarterly report on the state of graft in the country.

Writing in its latest newsletter, Accountability Watch, published today, the Executive Director of TISL, Lavina Banduah gives the following overview for the second quarter of 2016:   

In the second quarter of the year 2016, Sierra Leone continues to face not only an intensification of corrupt acts, but also the negative impacts of corruption on the country’s national development drive.