Half a thousand people have gathered in front of the Government Delegation in the Canary Islands called by the Federation of African Associations in the islands (FAAC) to describe the death of the young Gambian Abdoulai Bah as a "murder" by police shooting and to demand from the authorities "a transparent investigation, justice and reparation."
Bah, 19, was shot dead on Saturday at a bus stop at Gran Canaria airport by five agents of the National Police, who tried to reduce him after the boy threatened a taxi driver and another citizen with a knife.
In the scene, which was recorded by security cameras, it is observed how, at one point, the young man attacks an agent with the weapon, who falls backwards, and his companions shoot.
He received five shots, one of them in the neck, as confirmed by the Police themselves. The events are currently under investigation by a court in Telde, which will assess whether the agents' response was proportionate to the danger posed by Bah.
Afterwards, it became known that the young man, a boy under the guardianship until 2024 by the Government of the Canary Islands as a minor after arriving to the islands in a small boat, suffered from mental problems and that the National Police themselves had arrested him four days earlier when he was walking, disoriented, along the median of a highway in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
On the Saturday of his death he went to the airport with the purpose of flying to Gambia, when he did not have a ticket until this Thursday 22nd.
The protest on Thursday afternoon has been called by the Federation of African Associations of the Canary Islands and the Association of Afro-descendant Women, who describe what happened as "murder", believe the police reaction was "unjustified and disproportionate" and have called on the citizens present to chant "Black lives matter!".
The deputy in Congress for Las Palmas and federal secretary of Migration and Refugee Policies of PSOE, the Spanish-Senegalese Luc André Diouf, who in his day was also an undocumented immigrant, until he managed to regularize his situation and preside over the FAAC itself, also attended the demonstration, without taking the floor.
Among the half a thousand demonstrators, there were a large number of young Africans, many of them minors who arrived in a small boat and were under the tutelage of the autonomous community, as Abdoulie Bah was until 2024, who in the last year had worked as an educator in a reception center, providing his experience and his mastery of languages.
"We are black, not animals!", shouted one of the boys, who was joined by other people to then repeat the main slogan of the protest, summarized in the motto "it was not a death, it was a murder".
"Doesn't a black person have the right to have a mental health crisis without it costing them their life?", a woman asked.
The secretary of the FAAC, the sociologist of Ecouatoguinean origin Teodoro Bodyale, has asked everyone for restraint and has demanded a "transparent" investigation, because "citizens have the right to be able to trust security forces that act with proportionality and respect for legality and Human Rights."
The concentration began with a Muslim prayer in memory of Abdoulie Bah, followed by a drum beat.
Bondyale himself has explained the meaning: "In Africa, the drum sounds three times for every man. I did not have the opportunity to hear Abdoulie's birth drum, Abdoulie has not been able to play the marriage drum and today I have had the misfortune of hearing his farewell drum, the one of his death."
