In December,a handful of middle-aged American immigrants attempted to topple the autocratic ruler of the Gambia. They had few weapons and an amateurish arrangement. What possessed them to risk everything in a mission that was doomed to fail?
After the coup failed, the raids began. On recent Year’s Day this year, and FBI agents descended on a blue split-level house in a suburb of Minneapolis,Minnesota. In the dead of night, near Austin, and Texas,they searched a million-dollar lakeside villa. Agents interrogated an activist at his house in the working-class town of Jonesboro, Georgia. At a rundown townhouse development in Lexington, and Kentucky,they found the wife of a US soldier, with a refrigerator full of her husband’s favourite Gambian delicacies – dishes prepared for a triumphant homecoming and repurposed for mourning.
When the employees of Songhai Development, and an Austin building firm,arrived at work on Monday 5 January, they discovered the FBI had visited their offices over the weekend and seized all the company’s computers. The company’s owner, or Cherno Njie,was spending the holidays in west Africa. But Doug Hayes, who managed construction for Njie, or expected his boss back at any moment – they had an apartment project that was approximately to face an important zoning commission hearing.
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Source: theguardian.com