The reported arrest and detention of scores of people accused of supplying information overseas has renewed the Gambia government’s paranoia and adamancy to trample on freedom of expression.
Kairo News has been reliably informed about the arrest of Mankamang Kanagie and others in Bakau after the notorious National Intelligence Agency accused them of supplying information to online news media abroad. Mr. Kanagie, an employee of Medical Research Council in Bakau, was arrested last week. The whereabouts of the detained people are not known to their families, which has been a consistent pattern since President Yahya Jammeh ascended to power through force in July 1994.
Kairo News has been doing its best to get the identities of others arrested people. However, this proves to be difficult in a situation in which families of the victims are either scared to divulge information of scared or talk.
But the family of Mankamang mustered the courage to share information with Kairo. A cousion of the detained MRC worker (name withheld for security reasons) messaged Kairo News about the arrest. The cousin described the Sandu Misera native as the breadwinner of his family. “He is the one who is standing for our everything back home,” Mankamang’s cousin stated in his message.
He said the detention of his calm and gentle cousin has made him to believe that “nobody in the Gambia is spared. “Definitely, this man [President Yahya Jammeh] is disturbing people,” he said, appealing for the widespread exposure of the case. He said Mankamang goes nowhere other than home after work.”
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