Dear editor,
Unsurprisingly, APRC leadership and wayward supporters used their so-called Mega Rally as a platform to launch personal salvo on the TRRC and its hardworking members and doubling down on their lies and smear campaign. We have heard of the APRC’s obnoxious contempt towards the TRRC but Saturday’s event was a formal declaration of the party’s naked and dastard attempt to hoodwink the gullible supporters.
The Lead Counsel Essa Faal and the Director of Investigations and Research Alagie Saidy-Barrow often come under unfair and blatantly screwed up smear campaign by these shameless, bottomless, unrepentant and undignified politicians for nothing other than just carrying out their patriotic mandate to investigate the most appalling, the most vicious and the most devastating rights violations in our recent history. The deliberate, insultingly orchestrated efforts by the APRC against this important public institution is not rooted on some procedural disagreements or treatment of the witnesses but an outright vindictive and soulless misleading propaganda to distract, disrupt and divert the course of truth and justice in defense of only one man, Yahya Jammeh. APRC enabled, supported and glorified everything that went wrong in our country under Yahya Jammeh while in power and are now hell bent on vilifying victims, dishonoring the dead and ridiculing any and all efforts to shine light on these dark atrocities.
The TRRC is blessed to have serious, committed, educated and experienced patriots each of whom is light years above the average APRC leadership integrity, reputation and excellence metrics. To have these generationally inherent light-weights gather around to spew trash about these men and women of honor is pathetically painful and to have us silent about such despicable behaviors or amplify their uncouth messages is disgraceful.
As has been amply demonstrated time and again, APRC is not for/about the country. Never had and never will be. It is a group of blind sycophants with depraved, villainous base that only cares about the safety and protection of Yahya Jammeh at the expense of scores of lives ghastly lost, women brutally raped and multitude others victimized in the most barbaric of ways. I want to believe that we are not that cursed a people or that divided as a nation to allow such ugliness to take hold in our country. We should be better than that, I suppose.
APRC and their charlatans should not mistake democracy for our tolerance to their vilest utterances. Their unwarranted, foolish and contemptuous attacks on our public institutions and on men and women who work there will be treated as an attack on our conscience and we will respond blisteringly. We will come down heavy on them with all we got in honor of the victims and in defense of our fellow citizens. Make no mistake about that.
Is the Anticrime Unit aiding and abetting criminals?
Dear editor,
In November of 2018, a gentleman by the name Mamadou Bailo Barry, a barber at Tabokoto was duped of an amount of forty-nine thousand dalasis by a man who claimed to be a marabout. The man said that he was going to do some work for Bailo which will open him up and his luck will triple.
On a third visit in as many days, he gave Mamadou Bailo a concoction which he applied on his body and from then on seemed to have been under the thumb of the man. Whatever the man told him, he did. He repeatedly asked him for money and he willingly obliged.
Most of the amount, he had to get from friends and family as he could not raise the money readily. A friend then advised him that he should involve the police. He called an officer and told him. They arranged to meet the man and that is how the suspect was arrested.
He was taken first to Piccadilly Police Station but they could not convince him to speak. Finally, they took him to the Anticrime Unit headquarters in Bijilo where they met and complained to Mr Gorgi Mboob, the head of the ACU himself.
Well, he was told to bring his witnesses which he did and they all submitted their signed statements. Many weeks later, he went back to find out if there was any progress on the case only to be told that the guy had been bailed and had gone away. He tried to get in touch with the man but could not.
After a lot of frustrations, he went there to demand to be put in touch with either the accused or his bailer. They told him that the man who bailed the accused is one Metre Adama Bah. He met Metre Bah but he could not tell him anything other than that the man was only one of three who did the deed. But Mamadou said he met and dealt with only one man and thus he was the one he could accuse.
After almost a year, he went to the ACU again only to be told that they cannot take the matter to court. He said one Mr Bah of the CID unit at the ACU was the one who told him that the accused only spent eight thousand out of the forty-nine thousand, that the rest was shared between the two other collaborators who are still at large. He was told that the man can only refund the eight thousand he spent.
Of course, Mamadou refused to collect eight thousand because he owes so many people from whom he collected all the monies he gave to the accused. Now, that Mr Bah of the CID unit at the ACU tells him not to go there anymore.
The man has nowhere else to go and his money has been taken away. He reported it and helped the police get the man responsible who eventually confessed to the act but twelve months later, no court case, no money and no hope in sight for this poor man. What is our country coming to?
I could not reach the police PRO for comments.
Musa Bah
Bundung
