Daughter of Senegal anti-LGBT advocate arrested on lesbianism and drug charges
Mame Makhtar Guèye praises Senegal police, seeks no leniency for his daughter.
Senegal police have arrested the daughter of prominent anti-LGBT advocate Mame Makhtar Guèye on drug and lesbianism charges.
Fatou Binetou Guèye, known as “Rose,” was charged in the High Court of Dakar on Monday along with her boyfriend and two others. All four face charges of drug possession and drug trafficking, though the alleged evidence did not create the impression of a large drug-trafficking operation.
The alleged evidence in support of the lesbianism charge consists of erotic videos that police found on F.B. Gueye’s phone, which she said she downloaded out of curiosity.
In recent months, an anti-gay panic has swept Senegal, leading to hundreds of arrests and enactment of a law doubling the penalties for same-sex intimacy.
Mame Makhtar Guèye, vice-president of Senegal’s powerful anti-LGBT Islamist group Jamra, has been a prominent advocate of the wave of anti-gay repression. He did not deviate from that position after learning his daughter’s arrest. Instead, he “called on the justice system to show exemplary severity, including—and especially—towards his own daughter.”
He claims that forces of corruption in Senegal have targeted him and his family because of his opposition to moral decay.
Senenews reported: “It is precisely because he was aware of this pervasive threat that Mame Makhtar Guèye claims to have repeatedly warned his relatives for years. He recounts having repeatedly gathered his children, nieces, and the young women in his family to remind them that their position, due to their father’s activism, made them more vulnerable than others. ‘I told them: they tried everything with your father—money, cars, bribery, using women of loose morals. Nothing worked. So expect that one day they’ll try to hit the weakest link, which is the children,’ he reports.”
Senegal police said the four arrests came as they “dismantled an international hard drug trafficking network”, Seneweb reported. The only evidence they cited consisted of small quantities of cocaine — a total of 4 grams of cocaine held in 1- and 2-gram quantifies by the four defendants. By comparison, in the United States, possession of more than 500 grams of powder cocaine would trigger a federal drug-trafficking charge.
The defendants are F.B. Guèye, age 25; her boyfriend, R.S. Guissé; and two Nigerian nationals, K.M. Ogbu and M. Nwafor,
According to Seneweb, “It all began when police received information about an international cocaine trafficking network run by foreigners. An undercover agent contacted F.B. Guèye, alias ‘Rose’, 25 years old, to place an order for one gram of cocaine. It was under these circumstances that the young woman was arrested around 3:00 a.m. with the same quantity in a furnished apartment located near the VDN (Voie de Dégagement Nord).”
Under questioning, F.B. Guèye admitted to owning the seized drugs. After she said she got them from her boyfriend, police told her to order a gram of cocaine from him, which she did. Police arrested him when he delivered them. “A search of his room yielded a small quantity of cocaine”, Seneweb reported.
Police pressed him to order two grams of cocaine from his alleged supplier Ogbu, who also was arrested, and was persuaded to order two more grams of cocaine from Nwafor, who then was also arrested.
The four defendants were charged with conspiracy, possession and use of cocaine, and international hard-drug trafficking. Only F.B. Guèye faced the additional charge of lesbianism.
According to Seneweb, Senegal police handed her cell phone over to the National Gendarmerie’s Center for Combating Digital Crime (CLCN). There, “after analysis, experts discovered lesbian videos. These compromising videos show women engaging in sexual acts. The gendarmes also discovered a message in which the girl asked someone to find her a woman with a ‘slim waist.’ Therefore, F.B. Guèye, alias ‘Rose’, is suspected of having committed unnatural acts.
“When questioned about this converging evidence, she stated that she had downloaded the videos from the internet out of simple curiosity. She stated that she was teasing her interlocutor by only requesting a woman with a slim waist.”
