Mile 2
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Gambian’s Mile 2 prison, built next to a mosquito-infested swamp on the main road to the capital Banjul was opened in 1920 by British colonial authorities but became notorious under the Yahya Jammeh regime (1994-2017) for its gross human rights violations. Jammeh used the prison to incarcerate his opponents, his hit-squad, ’The Junglers’ and his feared National Intelligence Agency, under the command of Yankuba Badjie used it as a site to torture and murder those who fell foul of the regime. With Jammeh’s departure into exile in 2017 after an election defeat to Adama Barrow, prison reforms started to take place. On May 7, 2019, President Barrow commuted the death sentences of all 22 prisoners on death row to life imprisonment, as part of moving towards abolition of the death penalty. Prisoners in the remand wing still suffer from intense overcrowding, with many of them remaining there for years waiting for their cases to be heard. The most high-profile remand prisoner, as of January 2019, is Yankuba Badjie, the former director-general of the National Intelligence Agency. He and seven other operatives of the agency are being tried for murder.