A renowned educationist Batch Samba Jallow on Monday told the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission that he was part of 72 people who were detained at the Fajara Barracks in 1995.
Mr. Jallow said he and 71 other people were kept in detention in a garage at the Fajara Barracks where they encountered all sorts of torture and maltreatment from the officials of the National Intelligent Agency, now named the State Intelligence Service.
He described the place as terrible and that they (detainees) felt sad and pained that their rights were violated by the then regime of Yahya Jammeh.
“In the detention [centre] there was no window, no ventilation. We were there for 14 months. We had no bed,” Jallow, based in the United States, told the commission in tears.
Mr Jallow, who fled into exile to the United States of America shortly after his release from jail, recalled that one day vultures invaded their detention place bent on eating them.
“We didn’t take shower for 32 days and eighteen people to a basin and one gallon of water for a day, adding that the place stinks very terribly at the time. One day vultures came to eat us and soldiers fired gun to protect us,” he said.
He further gave an account of his arrest on Oct. 12, 1995 that he was arrested by a group of four officers from the defunct National Intelligent Agency around 7pm and put into a white Volvo wagon minivan.
“I was arrested at Bakoteh estate by a group of NIA soldiers in my house. They broke my compound gate and broke my house door and found me on the bed with my wife. They dragged me naked on the floor to the back door,” he told the commission in tears.
According to him, it was Daba Marena, Baba Saho, Musa Kinteh and Foday Barry, who arrested him while he was in bed with his wife and that they tortured him mercilessly.
