<<Print>>

The families of six Ghanaians killed in The Gambia are to be given monetary compensation, according to an agreement reached between The Gambian President Yahyah Jammeh and the President of Ghana, John Mills. The two reached the agreement Thursday in Libya where they are attending the ongoing AU Summit.The full details of the compensation agreement are yet to be known. However Ghana�s Information Minister, Zita Okaikwei tells Citi News it will certainly involve some amount of money given to the families of the victims.A statement signed by the Foreign Affairs Ministers of the two countries and witnessed by representatives of ECOWAS and the UN, said the two countries agreed that the perpetrators of the killing be arrested and prosecuted. They also agreed that the bodies of the six be exhumed and repatriated back home for proper burial. It was however agreed that The Gambia should not be held directly or indirectly responsible for the killing of the six alongside other West African nationals who died or disappeared. Both countries have also pledged to fight against human trafficking to avert such heinous deaths in the future. Ms Okaikwei told Citi News that the Ghanaian Government tried negotiating with the Gambian Government to accept responsibility they refused to accept the responsibility. �We were trying to negotiate with the Gambian Government to accept responsibility but they said that they were not directly responsibility for the murder of the Ghanaians. But our argument was that since the death occurred on Gambian soil, the Gambian government was responsible for those Ghanaians and so they needed to show some remorse and apologise to Ghana and to the bereaved families.� She said Forty four Ghanaians were originally thought to have been killed in The Gambia in 2005. But a joint UN-ECOWAS fact finding team identified only six of the victims as Ghanaians. The others are considered disappeared.