By: Nyima Sillah
Hagie Suwaneh, the 2nd Vice President of UDP Youth Wing, on Thursday, said the Gambia Police are provocative and a big threat to the peace and stability of the country.
He expressed that police should be well trained in crowd management as throwing teargas at innocent people gathering for peaceful demonstration or activity must stop. “Can you imagine, the PIU deliberately threw canisters (teargas) into Bob Keita’s sympathizers to provoke a violent reaction from a peaceful crowd gathered for solidarity.”
He claimed that since the coming into effect of teargas, the brutal PIU has now relied on it for brutalizing innocent citizens across the country even if they found three people gathering, they can throw teargas at them in the name of dispersing.
“This is our country and democracy we fought very hard to have, therefore, we should all leave our political differences aside and unite together to defend our most expensive asset which is justice. The only weapon we the ordinary citizens have is to gather and make our voices heard by the relevant authorities,” Suwaneh added.
However, he said: “This government has no regard for its own created laws they created. We all saw the executive overriding and disrespecting court orders to do what suits them.”
He went on saying “We cannot allow nepotism, favouritism, and ill–motives to ruin our judiciary. As much as we will never promote rape, we cannot also sit and see people hiding behind rape to trouble innocent people, for records purposes, I am not saying the accused person is guilty or innocent but all that I am saying is that due process and fair trial for Bob Keita and justice for the alleged murdered poor baby Muhammed,” he argued.