Lamin Tunkara’s wife wept as she gave evidence on the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of her husband.
Tunkara was the only Gambian who was arrested together with West African migrants in July 2005. They were later brutally killed on the orders of former President Yahya Jammeh.
Tunkara was arrested after he dashed out of his house following a phone call.
“They came with him to the house with his hands cuffed from behind. Those who escorted him did not wear uniform. But they were many, more than 10 people,” his wife Adama Conteh told the TRRC.
Adama said she was then asked to go out of the room.
“They told me to go out of the house. I went out and stood under the veranda. They did not stay long in there and they came out. The owner of the compound had come from his travels who asked them where they were going but someone among them told him he should come with them if he wants to know where they were going to. They left,” she said.
Kairaba Police Station was the last place his family knew him to have been kept – where his wife would take food to him. She would do so in the morning and in the afternoon.
All attempts to have him bailed failed and Adama then spent the next weeks and months looking for her husband. Her search took her to Jeshwang, Mile Two and even the NIA.
According to her, a man found her at the gate of the NIA who asked her to stop looking for him.
“Him telling me ‘so Lamin Tunkara is your husband’… It then occurred to me he knew something about it. He then put me in his car and took me home,” she said.
Tunkara’s child is now 15 years old.
