Gambia: Aminata Manneh Gender Activist Has Gone Missing After Filming a Police Officer Maltreating a Child

On Monday while on her way to work, she came across a highly disturbing scene of a Gambian police officer repeatedly beating a young girl of about 10 years of age with a long cane. She couldn’t bear it and started taking video of the horrible incident, which she shared with her over 4500 followers on Facebook with the caption” This is a total child right’s violation. Since when does a traffic police officer have a right to lay a hand of a young schoolgirl? What has become of our authorities?”

The video went viral and attracted lot of comments from people who feels equally shocked with the police officer’s behaviour and heartlessness towards a defenseless child. Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer and Human Rights Manager at Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice & human rights in New York twitted’’ Just saw a highly disturbing video of a Gambia police officer beating a young school girl in broad daylight. Sadly not an uncommon episode’’.

Last night after the video went viral, Aminata started getting contacts from people of National security agents from unanimous mobile numbers and also messages on facebook demanding to meet her urgently. That was the last time the family and friends have seen or heard of Aminata. All efforts were made to contact and locate her with no success. The family repeatedly calls her mobile phone, which appears to be completely switched off since the last time they heard from her. The family is very desperate and worried about her whereabouts and do not know where to go in order to locate their daughter.

Aminata gained admiration, respect and recognition from across all sectors of the Gambian society due to her gender and human right activism. The family is appealing to the authorities and everyone to gets any information on Aminata to come contact in order to reunite her with the worried family.