The following day, Barrow held a press conference declaring himself the “duly elected president.” Upon our return from the conference, three plain-clothed police officers were waiting for us at the hotel lobby. They asked us to hand over our passports together with our telephones and equipment. We were under arrest. It was the first time since I joined Al Jazeera in 2006 that I had faced a situation like that. I asked one of the police officers to let me send a final text message. He reluctantly agreed. I wrote to Doha that we were being held by the police, and I was not sure if I would be able to contact them again. Many questions spun through my head: Where are they taking us? How will we be treated? How will our families deal with this situation? “This is their last night in Gambia,” one of them whispered to his fellow officer. We were pushed into a small uncomfortable car, which finally stopped in front of the headquarters of the Intelligence Service. Inside the building, we were interrogated, among other things, about how we had entered the country. “Have you met with Adama Barrow?” we were asked. We replied that we had not.
We were told that we would be put on the first plane leaving for Nouakchott. They gave us our phones back. Before searching for a flight, we started sending messages to tell people that we were fine. To our surprise, the news of our arrest had spread like wildfire; Al Jazeera started contacting human rights organisations and the embassy of Mauritania in Banjul. The news even reached the then Mauritian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who requested that Jammeh ensure our release.
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