Now I just want to go home: First interview with British pilot incarcerated in brutal African jail accused of mass murder

At night, rats swarm through the bars of David Simpson’s prison cell as he lies, bathed in sweat and racked by malarial tremors, praying that his nightmare might soon be over.

Only a few months ago, this 24-year-old Yorkshire gamekeeper’s son was living his dream, piloting a light aircraft to track down wildlife in the African savannah.

Now, amid the appalling squalor of Ngaragba jail near Bangui in the Central African Republic, David still finds it impossible to believe the chain of events that brought him to this  hellhole, accused of mass murder.

Hellhole: David Simpson sits in his rat infested prison cell in the notorious African jail

Back in March, as he worked in the job he loved, David Simpson made a sickening discovery.
In a remote stretch of forest, he stumbled upon the mutilated bodies of six young men piled in a clearing. And the next day, seven more bodies nearby. 

The men had been tied together and horribly beaten to death. David did what any sane and civilised person would: he reported his gut-wrenching discovery to the authorities.
With hindsight, he recognises he should not have been surprised by what happened next. First, David was almost killed by a murderous lynch mob, whipped into a frenzy of hateful retribution.

His company’s camps and equipment were torched. Then David was thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of carrying out the brutal massacre he had discovered.

Yesterday, propped up in his cell on a grubby pillow, shivering and sweating simultaneously under a thin cotton sheet, David talked fully for the first time about the shocking events that led to his incarceration. 

‘I always suspected Africa was  thoroughly brutalised,’ he said. ‘But now I know for sure it’s a place where nobody cares about death.’

 As he talked, African prisoners lay around him on stained mattresses in the hopeless squalor of the cramped cell. Outside, the yard ran with urine, stinking latrines in one corner.

Locked up: David Simpson in the squalid prison cell he shared with 12 other men in the Central African Republic

It was nothing short of pitiful to see David shivering with malarial fever, holes in his mosquito net from rat bites, not daring to take food because of the disease’s vomiting symptoms.
David revealed how prosecution authorities have informed him  privately that he will be released within days, cleared of all charges – as sanity demands he must be.

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