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On July 7, 2006, two plainclothes officers of the National Intelligence Agency arrested “Chief” Ebrima Manneh at the office of his newspaper, the pro-government Daily Observer, according to Ousman Darboe, Manneh’s colleague who observed the arrest and wrote about it for CPJ. The reason for Manneh’s arrest was unclear, although some colleagues believe it was linked to his attempt to republish a BBC article critical of then-President Yahya Jammeh.
During the 11 years after his arrest, conflicting detail emerged about Manneh’s whereabouts and health, before
Gambian police in February 2017 informed the Manneh family that the journalist had died, according to Adama Manneh, one of his sisters.
“[The police said] he was killed and thrown in a well,” she told CPJ on September 29, 2017, adding that the well is located around Kanailai, in the Gambia’s southwest, near the border with Senegal. “They [the police] don’t have people responsible for his death … Now they need experts to come and destroy the well and try to get people who were thrown in there,” Adama Manneh told CPJ.
Witnesses reported seeing Manneh in government custody in December 2006 and in July 2007, according to CPJ research. Agence France-Presse quoted an unnamed police official in 2009 as saying that Manneh had been spotted at Mile 2 Prison outside Banjul in 2008, but the official also speculated that Manneh was no longer alive.
Over the years, despite dozens of inquiries from international organizations, the government did not provide a credible account of what happened to Manneh after he was taken into custody. In 2008, the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ruled that Gambia had unlawfully seized Manneh, and ordered his immediate release.
In a nationally televised meeting with local media representatives in March 2011, Jammeh described Manneh as having died, but denied any government involvement in the journalist’s fate. "Let me make it very clear that the government has nothing to do with the death of Chief Manneh," he said.
The justice minister at the time, Edward Gomez, provided contradictory information several months later. In an October 2011 interview with the local newspaper Daily News, Gomez said that Manneh was alive. In a subsequent interview with AFP, Gomez said, "Chief Ebrima Manneh is alive, and we will talk about this case later.”