A timber worker from Makeni who allegedly had his life savings stolen by a police officer and was then framed for murder to silence him has finally walked out of Sierra Leone’s most notorious prison after more than a decade of invisible incarceration. His story is not unique. That is the crisis.
Abu Kamara is a free man. He walked through the gates of Pademba Road Prison last week under the sun of a city that had continued without him for twelve years twelve years in which he was never charged, never tried, and never given a single day before a judge to say what he knew to be true.
He was not a convicted criminal. He was not even, in any meaningful legal sense, an accused one. He was a working man who trusted a police officer and was punished for it with more than a decade of his life.
The story begins in 2014 in Makeni, where Kamara was employed in the timber logging industry. He had entrusted his life savings of twenty-five thousand Leones, along with several personal items, to a police officer identified as Mohamed Bangura, who had promised to assist him in depositing the funds into a bank.
The money never reached the bank. When Kamara began pressing for its return, the officer’s response was not repayment it was retaliation. According to Kamara, Officer Bangura instructed fellow officers to arrest him on a fabricated accusation of murder. When Kamara protested loudly at the injustice of his detention, the officer allegedly used his distress as further ammunition, branding him a “madman” to discredit his account and deter anyone from taking his claims seriously.
He was then transferred to Pademba Road Correctional Centre in Freetown and forgotten.
For the next twelve years, Kamara remained in custody at Pademba Road Prison, where he vanished into the shadows of the legal system. No trial. No hearing. No one from the system came to ask why he was still there.
His liberation was eventually made possible through the intervention of Mr. Sheku Kamara and Hope Behind Bars Sierra Leone, an organisation dedicated to providing legal aid and support to inmates who have been unlawfully detained. The details of how they identified Abu Kamara’s case have not been fully disclosed, but the outcome was unambiguous: a man who the system had buried was pulled back into the light, his case reviewed, and his continued detention found to have no legal basis whatsoever.
The release drew a response from high-ranking officials. Joseph Senessie, the Director General of the Sierra Leone Correctional Service, expressed appreciation for Hope Behind Bars’s intervention, acknowledged the gravity of the situation, and stated that the Correctional Service is committed to working alongside the organisation to identify and rectify similar cases of prolonged detention without trial.
The Director General’s statement, while welcome, carries within it an admission that no one in authority chose to examine carefully: there are other Abu Kamaras still inside.
Abu Kamara’s case is extreme in its duration. But the structural conditions that produced it are neither new nor rare in Sierra Leone. The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention and provide for the right of any person to challenge the lawfulness of their detention in court yet the government has generally not observed these requirements. Arrests without warrants have been common, and the Sierra Leone Police has frequently failed to follow proper arrest procedures.
The problem of prolonged pre-trial detention at Pademba Road has been documented for years. As recently as July 2025, a special Prison Court initiative funded by UNDP reviewed the cases of 115 inmates and found dozens whose cases had stalled for years some through prolonged adjournments at the High Court, others through cases suspended indefinitely at the magistrate level. Nineteen were released that day. The implication of each such exercise is the same: the people freed are not exceptions to the system. They are products of it.
During Judicial Week earlier this year, the Legal Aid Board Sierra Leone secured the discharge of 234 accused persons from various courts around the country using habeas corpus petitions and summary case reviews a figure that, rather than representing a success story, represents 234 people who should not have been there in the first place.
As Abu Kamara breathes free air again, a question hangs unanswered: what happens to Mohamed Bangura?
If Kamara’s account is accurate and twelve years of imprisonment without a shred of legal process does nothing to undermine it then a serving police officer abused his authority to have an innocent man falsely arrested, used his institutional power to brand that man a criminal, and watched while the system did the rest. The fabricated murder charge, the transfer to Freetown, the twelve years of silence: none of this was accidental. It required the active participation of the very institution that exists to protect citizens.
Kamara’s story has sparked renewed calls for urgent reforms within the Sierra Leonean police force and the judiciary to ensure that no other citizen suffers a similar fate. Those calls are just, but they are also familiar. They have been made before, after other cases, with the same urgency and the same eventual silence.
Abu Kamara left Pademba Road with twelve years gone that no court order, no apology, and no reform commission can return to him. He lost more than a decade of wages, relationships, freedom, and the version of his life that would have unfolded if a police officer had simply given him back his money.
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For the families of everyone still inside those walls waiting for a trial date that may never come, that is both the most hopeful thing and the most insufficient thing imaginable.
Anyone with information about individuals being held at Sierra Leone correctional facilities without trial is encouraged to contact Hope Behind Bars Sierra Leone or the Legal Aid Board Sierra Leone.
