NIA’s Ngorr Secka Reports to Work At Guinean Embassy

By Ebrima G. Sankareh, Editor-In- Chief

Unimpeachable sources close to the corridors of power reveal that Gibril Ngorr Secka (a.k.a Mam Ngorr) the erstwhile National Intelligence Agency operative who was detained for a year at Gambia’s Mile II Prisons, has reported to Guinea Bissau as Deputy Ambassador to that impoverished West African state. It can be recalled that Ngorr Secka and several other intelligence and high profile security operatives were hurriedly picked up during the pandemonium and wholesale human rights violations in the aftermath of the foiled March 23, 2006 military coup allegedly led by fugitive army Colonel Ndure Cham.

             Shortly after the alleged coup, close to a hundred people if not more, were arrested and some severely tortured while others were allegedly subjected to summary executions or forced disappearance; a scheme Secka an NIA veteran is pretty familiar with. By a concomitant twist of irony, Secka’s mentor and much predacious NIA Director General Daba Marena and four soldiers – Lieutenant Ebou Lowe, Alieu Ceesay, Sgt. Alpha Bah and Sgt. Manlafi Corr were executed in cold blood after what sources called “traumatic experience in the hands of thugs.” Marena reveal our sources, was pummeled and subjected to the cruelest form of torture, lapsed into comatose before he was executed. After their execution in the famous prisoner transfer hoax of April 4, 2006, the state maintains that the five alleged conspirators escaped. There were fears that Marena and colleagues were in fact, extrajudicially executed or victims of enforced disappearance a situation that has become the new normal ever since President Yahya Jammeh came to power on July 22, 1994. To date, no independent investigation into their alleged escape had been initiated.

Paradoxically, Ngorr Secka was so sick that rumours were once rife that the NIA poster boy was tortured and could eventually succumb. To play the devil’s advocate, reveals Kissy Kissy Mansa, Ngorr’s elder sister was pressured to resign her prestigious secretarial job at a local opposition political bureau to probably appease Jammeh the Gambian dictator but he was kept at Mile II, (Africa’s hell on earth) for a full grueling year. Mr. Secka’s mission to Guinea Bissau came in the wake of reports by The Gambia Echo that he was appointed Ambassador to French Guinea, although our most credible source Kissy Kissy Mansa, had cautioned that, that was a departure from normal diplomatic relations with Guinea bearing in mind that usually, the High Commissioner to Sierra Leone overseas that jurisdiction.

        For now though, it remains to be seen how long Secka will stay in Bissau under Ambassador Cherno Touray, a school teacher turned diplomat and whether or not he will eventually return to his den at NIA headquarters where this once easy-going fine fellow with an urbane disposition was turned to be a hardened NIA animal.

        In fact, according to our most competent sources Gibril Ngorr Secka was among the top intelligence brass that coordinated and witnessed the transfer and shackling of 55 West African immigrants mostly Ghanaians in July 2005 at the Banjul Naval headquarters. The immigrants were later taken to Siffoe Farms and executed. In the confusion that ensued, two escaped and told their countrymen the horrors they saw at Siffoe. During his days at Mile II Prisons, many observers had reasoned that as an eyewitness to the immigrants’ predicament he was doomed since the regime was out to systematically wipe out all key actors.