DRESSED in ankle-length vermilion robes, adorned with hundreds of tiny cracked mirrors, the witch-hunters had first been spotted by watchmen, through the flames of their campfires, emerging from the bush in the dead of night.

Aroky Bajung, a mother of six, was one of the first sleeping villagers to wake. She caught fleeting glimpses of ceremonial gowns glinting in the moonlight as the tall strangers flitted between houses like ghosts. She grabbed her children and cowered under her bed, praying for morning to come.

By daybreak the fitful dreams of the villagers of Jambur in western Gambia had become a terrifying reality as they woke to the sound of screams and a spidery trail of blood and animal entrails. Before them, flanked by mysterious red-cloaked strangers, stood the notorious Green Boys, Gambia’s feared private militia.

“We have work to do here,” the soldiers shouted. “The president’s work.”

Within two hours the soldiers had seized more than 100 people. Simultaneously across Gambia another 1,200 suspected witches, both men and women, were rounded up. Shaking with fear, they were taken to secret government detention centres.

Here their nightmare really began. In the name of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia’s dictator, they had been singled out for exorcism. Accused of being witches, they were blamed for the death of the president’s beloved aunt. By nightfall at least six had died after they were forced to drink a mysterious potion. Those who survived the foul concoction spent the following days racked with pain. Some claimed to have bled from their eyeballs.

An Amnesty International report noted that Jammeh, 44, has presided over a dramatic deterioration in human rights. Last week he sacked his ambassador to Washington a day before she was due to meet Amnesty officials to discuss human rights abuses.

Until now the villagers of Jambur and 20 other small communities have been too terrified to speak out against their president and his witch-hunt.

“I remember the scarlet flashes, the glinting of their robes. My children wake up crying, asking me when the men are coming back to take them,” said Bajung, 35. She believes she was seized because she had tried to help an elderly neighbour.

She added: “Here we are taught to worship the elderly. The witch doctors were smearing them with paste and shouting spells at them. When I tried to stop them I was bundled onto an army bus.”

Within an hour she and 100 others from Jambur were taken for a mass exorcism. They were forced to strip and drink the concoction that made them hallucinate and gave them severe pains. “People were vomiting blood and having fits. It was terrifying,” she said.

During the witch-hunts, which were orchestrated by the Green Boys, Jammeh’s most militant supporters, thousands fled over the Senegal border. Others were shot in the head.

In the tiny village of Makumbaya, Hawa Jallow and Kaody Soee, the first and second wives of Mamadou Bah Fulla, 60, said the murder of their husband by the Green Boys had left their family destitute. Jallow said: “The Green Boys said they had come for the witches who had killed the president’s aunt.

They said the president had heard in a dream that witches had come to kill her and now they must pay the price.”

After a few days other villagers began to return but there was no sign of their husband.

“We went to the nearest barracks to ask where he was, but nobody knew,” added Jallow. “A week later we found out he was dead. A doctor who looked at some of the other victims said they had kidney problems from drinking the potion.”

The witch-hunts are only a small part of the deadly and bizarre behaviour of Gambia’s president. In a recent speech in Banjul, the capital, he repeated his belief that all journalists should be killed. Recently he jailed six of Gambia’s most prominent journalists for two years.

Earlier this year Jammeh held a mass demonstration of his homemade cure for Aids. He invited thousands of local victims of the disease to abandon western anti-retroviral drugs and line up at the gates of his palace to try his herbs and banana remedy. A doctor who criticised the call to abandon the medication was jailed.

Superstition and mysticism go hand in hand under Jammeh’s erratic rule. He regularly threatens to behead homosexuals and drive them out of the country. He also declared that only he can drive through the giant arch built to commemorate his 1994 coup.

He has won three elections since seizing power. The first, in 1996, was dismissed as “unfair” by observers and the second, in 2001, was won with 53% of the vote after a campaign marred by bloodshed. He won two-thirds of votes cast in 2006 but opposition leaders complained of intimidation.

Back in Jambur, Karomo Bojang, an imam, is one of 40 Muslims taken in the witch-hunts. “Why did they use witch doctors to force me and my neighbours to drink some unworldly potion?,” he asked.

“We are living among madness. Our lives are in the hands of a lunatic.”

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