A Gambian man who was part of an armed unit run by former dictator Yahya Jammeh and was convicted of torture by a US jury in April has been sentenced to more than 67 years in prison, the US Justice Department said on Friday.
A Colorado jury convicted the Gambian national, Michael Sang Correa, for his participation in the torture of numerous victims in Gambia in 2006, including beating and flesh burning, because of the victims’ purported involvement in a coup plot against the then-president, the Justice Department said.
Correa, 46, was sentenced to 810 months in prison by Senior Judge Christine Arguello for the District of Colorado after conviction on one count of conspiracy to commit torture and five counts of torture, the department said in a statement.
The case marked the first criminal prosecution over involvement in the feared armed group known as “the Junglers,” which operated in Gambia’s police state during Jammeh’s rule. The former president seized power in 1994 and foiled several attempts to overthrow him before he lost a 2016 election.
Correa was arrested in 2020 under a law which makes it a crime for anyone in the US to commit torture abroad.
Jammeh denied torture during his rule.
The Junglers were a secretive offshoot of the Gambian army that took orders from Jammeh. Rights groups and former victims say they carried out brutalities that worsened after a failed coup in 2006.
Suspected coup plotters and other outspoken opponents of Jammeh were taken to the National Intelligence Agency near one of the capital Banjul’s white sand beaches, according to victims.
Some found themselves in a torture chamber where they were subjected to electric shocks, beatings and burning with acid, they said. (Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
Gambian man sentenced to more than 67 years after US conviction for torture
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Gambian man sentenced to more than 67 years after US conviction for torture
- Michael Sang Correa, a member of former Gambian dictator Jammeh’s death squad, was convicted by US jury in April
- Rights groups say Jammeh carried out brutalities against critics and political dissenters
Two family members of Mexico’s education secretary killed in shooting
MEXICO CITY: Authorities in the western Mexican state of Colima said they killed three people suspected in the shooting deaths of two family members of Mexico’s secretary of education on Saturday.
Colima, located on Mexico’s Pacific coast, is one of the country’s most violent states. It recorded the highest homicide rate in Mexico in 2023 and 2024, according to the US State Department.
The local prosecutor’s office said officers killed three suspects in the 4:30 am (1030 GMT) shooting of two women, whom Mexico’s Secretary of Public Education Mario Delgado later identified as his aunt and cousin.
They did not identify a motive in the shooting or say whether they were searching for other suspects.
“Deep shock, outrage, and sorrow over the events that occurred this morning in Colima, where my aunt Eugenia Delgado and my cousin Sheila were brutally murdered in their home,” Delgado wrote on X on Saturday.
Officials tracked the suspects’ vehicle to a Colima home on Saturday afternoon and killed three people in a gunfight, according to the prosecutor’s office.
Investigators found weapons and clothing in the suspects’ home linked to the double shooting.
Delgado was appointed education secretary by President Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024. He previously served as national president of the ruling Morena party.
