Days after normalcy returned to the African country of Gambia formerly presided upon by Yahya Jammeh, and currently presided upon by Adam Barrow, memories of loved ones arrested during the tenure of Jammeh has been echoing.
According to Ceoafrica, one of them is Ebrima Manneh, a journalist, with Daily Observer.
It was gathered that after his arrest on the 11th of July, 2006, he asked an office guard (Alhagie Jobe) to save some tea with the words "I'm coming right back", but hasn't returned till date.
Rights groups say Manneh is one of dozens of Gambians who disappeared without trace during the 22-year rule of President Yahya Jammeh, which ended last month when he fled the country.
Relatives have tried in vain for a decade to find the journalist, nicknamed "Chief" although he held no traditional title. Now they believe he is dead and, like a growing number of Gambians, say they are seeking justice.
"I want the new government to take action and prosecute whosoever had a hand in my brother's disappearance," said his sister Adama Manneh, a police officer, wearing a T-shirt bearing her brother's face that read: "Where is Chief Manneh?" Ebrima's brother Lamin said he hoped at least to recover the body.
Some families hope to gather evidence for a case against Jammeh - who quit under international pressure after losing an election in December, for human rights abuses, including unlawful detention, torture and murder of perceived opponents, charges his supporters deny.
Attempts by journalists to reach Jammeh for comment in Equatorial Guinea, where he fled to, were unsuccessful.
Rights officials say building a case could be tough. Another African ex-leader, former Chadian president Hissene Habre, was jailed for life last year for crimes against humanity, more than a quarter century after his overthrow.
Habre was convicted by a court in Senegal with the help of incriminating documents, but rights officials say any hard evidence against Jammeh is lacking so far.
Manneh was 28 when the intelligence officers came to call at the Daily Observer's offices in the capital, Banjul and on various occasions, Jammeh and his officials told reporters he was dead, had fled the country and had "stage-managed" his disappearance, according to an annual human rights report published in 2012.
The family still do not know the reason for his arrest, though colleagues suspect it may have been related to comments he wrote about the former president.
Adding to the mystery, Manneh called his mother immediately after his arrest, asking her to fetch his bag from the office. Manneh had said he was planning a trip abroad and would not be able to get it himself, his mother Sulay Ceesay told reporters.
Three days later, on July 14, Manneh's sister discovered his passport in the bag, "I said to myself: 'Chief did not travel, he is in town'," said Adama.
The search began but family members were unable to find out where he was taken after the local police station. Two witnesses said they spotted him on separate occasions in hospital in 2007 looking sickly, but Adama said officials prevented her from visiting him at the time.
When Adama made inquiries within the police force, her superiors warned that she too risked arrest.
In 2007, the Media Foundation for West Africa, an NGO, brought a legal action against the Gambian government at the Community Court of Justice, a body set up by the ECOWAS group of West African states. The government lodged no defense and failed to show up for the case.
The Nigerian-based regional court ruled in 2008 that Gambia had violated Manneh's human rights. It ordered the government to free him and pay the family $100,000. The compensation was never handed over, the family said.
The court heard Manneh had been shuttled between at least six different detention sites between 2006 and 2008, and was never charged or given access to a lawyer. One witness, a journalist from a different newspaper, told the court he had seen Manneh being led back to a police cell in December, 2006.
Edward Gomez, who was justice minister and attorney general in 2010-2012 and later acted as Jammeh's lawyer, expressed ignorance of the journalist's fate; "I know what happened is very painful but quite frankly I don't know what happened to him", Gomez told reporters.
Every year Adama went to Banjul's main prison to attend the annual release of pardoned prisoners to see if her brother was among them. Hope finally deserted her only in the past month when the new president released more than 100 political prisoners from some of the country's many detention centers. Manneh was not among them.
"I was thinking that my brother would be released but he never showed up there and I knew he had been killed," Adama said in the courtyard of her home near Banjul with her mother and sister, their cheeks glistening with tears.
