Sanna Sabally, a key member of Gambia’s erstwhile military junta has urged former President Yahya Jammeh to pluck the courage and face the Truth Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) to tell their side of what happened while they were in power.
In a day of rollercoaster emotions during his second day of hearing at the TRRC on Thursday, Sabally called on the exiled Jammeh and his former colleagues who made up the junta including Yankuba Touray and Edward Singhateh to embrace the commission with true narratives of their conduct as leaders of the country.
“I want to beg them for God’s sake let them plan by all means wherever they are let them try and come and face the TRRC. There is nothing wrong in it and if there is anything wrong just come and tell the truth” he said in his concluding remarks after a three-hour testimony at the commission.
Earlier during his testimony, Sabally said he was tortured many times without number during the entire length of his incarceration at Mile Two prison as his alleged tortures led by Alhajie Martin tried desperately to extract confessions from him suggesting that he had tried to assassinate Jammeh.
He claimed in the process of extracting facts from him, the ‘torture team’ had buried his whole body except his head which they threatened to bury if he refused to confess.
He said after he had refused to budge, Martin and his team beat him using a hammer on his head until he passed out.
Still recounting his tribulations in prison, the former junta deputy said he was forced to eat human excreta by his torturers and tied and hanged with his hands with no wooden plank under his body under which an iron rod was placed to impale him if he dropped his hold.
However, the testimonies that elicited tears from both the witness and lead counsel Essa Faal was his alleged castration ostensibly by his torturers who also meted out the same treatment to his fellow prisoner and former colleague Sadibu Hydara.
He claimed that they were subjected to this torture after both men refused to perform sexual acts on each other.
Hydara, Sabally claimed later died in his cell at the remand wing of the Mile Two prison from his castration, after losing a lot of blood.
At this juncture Counsel Faal produced a report by the then National Intelligence Agency concluding that Hydara had died as a result of hypertension, a conclusion dismissed as fallacious by Sabally.
Meanwhile, after his frank testimony in which he onoce again owned up to ordering the execution of the ringleaders of a foiled coup in November 1994, Matty Sallah, the widow of Abdoulie Bah, one of his victims told Counsel Faal via a text message that she and her family have forgiven Sabally in view of what she called his frank narrative of what had happened.
WN/as/APA