Autor: Nick Turse | 28. 8. 2023
The men gathered in a graveyard in the dead of night. They wore body armor, boots and carried semi-automatic weapons. Their target lay a mile away, the official residence of the president of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh — a U.S.-trained military officer who seized power in 1994. Those in the cemetery planned to oust him, but within hours, they were either dead or on the run. One of those killed, the ring-leader and former head of Gambia’s Presidential Guard, Lamin Sanneh, had previously earned a master’s degree at the Pentagon’s National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
Some of the plotters were eventually convicted in the United States “for their roles in planning and executing an unsuccessful coup attempt to overthrow the government of The Gambia on December 30, 2014.” Four pled guilty on counts related to the Neutrality Act — a federal law that prohibits Americans from waging war against friendly nations. A fifth was sentenced in March 2017 for buying and exporting weapons used in the failed coup, which pitted two generations of U.S.-trained mutineers against each other.
