Essa Faal branded former President Yahya Jammeh a ‘charlatan’ and a ‘quack’ who hoodwinked sick Gambians into a fraudulent treatment programme – referring to the former dictator’s fake HIV/AIDS cure.
“We’ve heard about the fraudulent PATP. Well, only one person claimed to have been cured and that person did not come to the commission. It’s being rumoured out there. But everybody else who was in that programme and testified in this commission said they are still HIV-positive and that soon after the treatment they had to go into convention medicine. Without that they would have died. They were hoodwinked into believing that our president had a cure. He (Jammeh) fraudulently lured our sick people into a treatment programme that was bogus. He was a charlatan. He was a quack. Can’t be described in any lesser way,” Mr Faal said while addressing TRRC commissioners on Friday as the curtain fell on the probe’s public hearings after more than two years.
Mr Faal said elsewhere, of Jammeh’s crimes: “We’ve heard how the West African migrants were butchered in several places around the country, 67 of them. Initially we thought they were 34, then 44, then 57 and ultimately 67. Butchered and the government went on a campaign to cover this up.
“Well, we have heard even today the witch hunting exercise that was ordered by Jammeh. Forty-one people died, a lot of them our grandmothers and our grandfathers. Humiliated, tortured, some sexually abused.”
