By Richard Pendlebury
Mail onlineAt the State House in the Gambian capital of Banjul one evening last week, President Yahya Jammeh addressed a gathering of his nation's Christian leaders.
His Excellency told them that not a single member of their religious faith had been convicted of a crime by a Gambian court during the whole of 2008.
What a marvellously trouble-free example the Christians were to his country's Muslims, who make up 97 per cent of the population.
This was a puzzling statement by the head of state, given that in Banjul only a few hours earlier, two Pentecostal missionaries, David and Fiona Fulton, originally from Devon, had been sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour for allegedly spreading sedition against his rule.
The case had already made international headlines and did so again the next morning.
But if any of the senior churchmen present raised a cynical eyebrow at the President's blandishments, it went unreported by the state media.
After all, Gambians have learned it's best not to contradict a leader who claims to have personally invented a 'cure' for Aids using green paste and bananas and has kept power for 14 years through what Amnesty International lists as 'unlawful detention, torture, unfair trials, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial executions'.
Two hundred years after the British established it as a base from which to attack the West African slave trade, fear and political oppression are the twin realities of life in Africa's smallest mainland nation.
In those early days, the only way to communicate along the steamy banks of the great Gambia River was by small boat and word of mouth.
Today the internet has reached the larger towns, allowing instant access to the rest of the world for a few of its inhabitants.
It is thanks to the internet that the Fultons came to be lodged last night in the notorious Mile Two maximum security prison on Banjul's outskirts.
Emails which they had sent to friends in the UK had found their way back to Gambia and into the hands of Jammeh's security apparatus.
One of the messages had apparently contained the observation that the country was 'sinking fast into a morass of Islam'.
But what undoubtedly sealed their fate was the description of the president as a 'madman'.
In many respects, the Fultons' story is one of sin and redemption, struggle and disenchantment, set against a tropical background of seething violence and widespread corruption.
But there are areas which remain unclear, not least among them David Fulton's colourful life before he found God and relocated to the African jungle.
He was born 60 years ago and was brought up in the Scottish seaside town of Troon, where his elderly mother still lives.
According to a cousin, Mr Fulton left the town in his late teens and would appear to have joined the British Army.
But members of his wife's family seem vague about his military career and immediate aftermath. (His own are not commenting on the affair, in the hope of securing a presidential pardon.)
But two biographical details have been repeated as fact in all press reports on Mr Fulton since his arrest.
The first is that he had been an Army officer and risen to the rank of Major. The second - made all the more remarkable by the first - is that after leaving the military he embarked on an armed robbery spree which led to his imprisonment.
But contemporary newspaper accounts of this remarkable and unexplained rise and fall are conspicuous by their absence.
Nobody of Fulton's name and seniority appears on the Army Lists - the annual directories of serving officers - during the relevant period.
But friends recall that he said he was a major in the Territorial Army while in Devon.
Family album: David Fulton and his wife Fiona holding their adopted daughter Elizabeth, alongside son Luke and daughter Iona
On the website of the Christian charity Prison Fellowship International (PFI), with which Mr Fulton has been working for many years, there is a brief account of his earlier life.
It states: 'As a young man David had served in the British Army, where he had risen to the rank of major.
'Despite his military career, David also had a background in prison. When he was in his 30s he became involved in armed robberies. "I robbed security cars all over England," Mr Fulton says.
'When the law eventually caught up with him, he faced the possibility of serving a lengthy prison sentence.'
The family emigrated to Gambia in 1999 (file picture)
While in prison, David visited the prison chapel and converted to Christianity.
During the early to mid Eighties, he served time at Dartmoor Prison in Devon and then Channings Wood, a category-C training prison near Newton Abbot, also in Devon.
It was at the latter establishment that he met and fell in love with Fiona McMinn, a prison visitor from nearby Torquay, 14 years his junior.
She came from what one family member described as a 'conventional Christian background', but had a strong faith which Mr Fulton now shared.
They married in 1986 and had two children, Iona, now 20, and Luke, 18. After his release, Mr Fulton went into the car repair business in Torbay, where the family lived in the Nineties.
A source close to Mrs Fulton's family said: 'We never knew exactly what David had done in the Army, not even what his regiment was or where he might have seen service.
'But I had no doubt because of references he made to his service, in particular an operation which involved helicopters, that he was a regular Army soldier.
'Whether he didn't speak about it because of the sensitivity of what he had done or whether he was just private about it, I don't know. It was the same with his time in prison.
'The reason he came to settle in Devon was because he had first been moved there, to a jail at Newton Abbot.
'He never spoke to me about what he had done, where he had done it or when it had all happened.
'Obviously we knew he had met Fiona in prison, so we knew he had been convicted and was doing time.'
Maureen Stone, a local family friend, had a similar story. She says: 'I didn't know much about his background - certainly not that he had ever been in prison.
'I think his involvement with the Army continued after he left, because I recall that he was in the TA.
'In the years before they went to Gambia for good, we used to help them collect old tools and sewing machines, which he would then take out there and give to young offenders in prison.
'That was so typical of him. He was always trying to help others.
'I couldn't believe it when I heard what had happened on the news. But David had a strong sense of what was right and wrong.
'He would speak up when he felt something wasn't fair.'
The PFI website says Mr Fulton had a 'calling' to go and minister in Gambia after going there on holiday.
A source close to Mrs Fulton's family said the couple announced their decision to become missionaries at a family dinner. He described it as a surprise, 'but they felt very strongly about it'.
The family emigrated to Gambia in 1999.
'David was planning on doing vehicle maintenance to pay his way, but I think soon after they got there the government introduced a licence system whereby non-Gambians had to pay to work,' says the source.
'The cost of the licence was so prohibitively high you would have had to work for years before you could recoup the outlay.
'That was the reason they went across into doing full-time missionary work.'
Given what has since happened, it is ironic that Mr Fulton found work as a chaplain to Jammeh's armed forces and prison network.
Mrs Fulton was appointed chaplain to Bunjal's international airport while spending most of her time visiting the terminally ill.
The family source explained: 'Their funding came from a network of supporters, particularly Canada, but not particular churches other than one near Manchester - the Westhoughton Pentecostal Church.
'It paid for all sorts of things but particularly medicine, some of which might be sent out from the UK.
'Sometimes Fiona would cross into neighbouring Senegal to buy basic supplies such as antibiotics.
'Money could be erratic and for a long time they only had half a house and half a roof until more money arrived and they could add bits on.
'Everything is so haphazard out there. People don't think long-term, but when your goal is to get through the day alive and fed, you have very different priorities - especially when there is so much disease and danger.'
It was a great comfort for the Fultons to be able to talk of their work and troubles with the outside world.
'In the early days, they would send regular letters back and more recently emails,' says the source.
'When they first got online they used an internet cafe. But then they got their own connection.
'The emails which came back were almost like installments in a book in that each one could be a chapter in their daily life. I can imagine how they came to be misconstrued.
'If you know David and the sort of person he is and the sort of humour he had, then you wouldn't read too much into his words.
'But if you were Gambian and in authority, and read them literally without any wit or irony, then you might take offence.'
The emails contained grumbles about a number of aspects of life in Jammeh's Gambia, including the chronic shortages of fuel and water, according to a member of the Fulton family.
On one occasion, they were stopped by the authorities from giving water from their new borehole to local people because the authorities were asking for contributions towards the fuel for the generator that pumped it.
Life had become increasingly hard for everyone in the past two years. In March 2006 Jammeh claimed to have uncovered yet another coup attempt - the sixth since he came to power.
It led to a fresh round of arrests, imprisonments and disappearances. Against this background, the Fultons decided to send their two teenage children back to Devon to finish their education.
They had just adopted a baby Gambian girl whom they called Elizabeth when Mr Fulton was sacked from his prison chaplaincy for allegedly trying to convert inmates.
There had also been a number of religiously motivated attacks on him in the street and he had begun to carry a gun for protection.
On one occasion, he is said to have fired it at an assailant.
Latterly, the couple were based in Kerr Sering, an hour from the capital. Mr Fulton was ministering to communities deep in the bush.
A family friend spoke of 'domestic difficulties' which put Mr Fulton 'under a tremendous amount of pressure' and might have clouded his judgment.
One message from Mr Fulton, sent in September, was apparently headed: 'Hell in The Gambia.'
Another read: 'I believe it is quite clear there is a growing extremist element in the army and indeed in the country.
'I suggest that we arm the Muslims with sticks and the Christians with machine guns and let them fight.'
It seems that these and other offending emails were seen by a Gambian national living in the UK with whom the Fultons had fallen out. The couple were arrested on November 24.
On Christmas Eve they changed their pleas to being guilty of attempting to 'bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the President of the Republic, President Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya Jammeh and the government of Gambia'.
While on remand, Mr Fulton was held at the squalid Mile Two, where beriberi, malaria and food poisoning kill a number of prisoners each year. Having refused to eat the food he is given, his health is failing.
His wife was kept at Banjul's main police station, while Elizabeth is being cared for by friends.
They both face a year's imprisonment in Mile Two, plus hard labour - possibly in one of the peanut plantations which, along with tourism, are a cornerstone of the economy.
Meanwhile, their daughter Iona is reportedly due to give birth in the UK. Little wonder the Fultons both broke down and cried when sentence was passed this week.
'It's so hard for all of us back here,' says a family member. 'We are desperate for information about what is happening to them yet so little is filtering back.
'The Deputy High Commissioner is one of the few allowed to visit them.'
Last night, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman said: 'We will continue to provide consular assistance to them both. There have been no significant developments.'
On Sunday, a letter from the Fultons to Jammeh was read out on Gambian state television.
They wrote: 'We are grateful for the opportunity to be able to apologise publicly to His Excellency and humbly ask for what will graciously and compassionately show us clemency.
'We humbly ask that the present proceeding be withdrawn and our passports be returned to us so we may return to the United Kingdom with our little daughter Elizabeth on the first flight available to us.'
Reports yesterday suggested that the two-year-old has, in fact, now been sent to Britain.
Friends say that before his arrest Mr Fulton was putting the finishing touches to his autobiography.
From 'Army officer' to armed robber, to missionary to prisoner once again, it promises to be gripping.
