Minister of Interior
By Buba Gagigo
Yankuba Sonko, the Minister of Interior has accepted giving reckless information in 2006 on the whereabouts of Chief Ebrima Manneh, a missing journalist, while he was Inspector General of Police.
Minister Sonko appeared at the Truth Commission on Tuesday. During his testimony, a news article was read to him from an interview he [Sonko] granted a local journalist. In the interview, he told the journalist that Chief Manneh was in America.
“I accept that the statement is reckless, but not false; because at that time that’s the information I was given,” Sonko said.
After Counsel Faal put to him that Chief Manneh could not have been in America in June 2011 because The Gambia government knew the journalist was in the Gambia before the 2006 elections, Sonko letter accepted that his statement about Chief Manneh was false as he was given the information by the counsel.
Ebrima Manneh was a Gambian journalist working for the Daily Observation, now defunct. He was arrested in July 2006 and secretly held in custody at different locations. In 2019 The Trumpet reported that Manneh had died in captivity at some point in mid-2008. And according to CPJ report he had been killed, and thrown into a well.