📰 From the news · Impersonating a real college/agent
Three men aged 47 to 49, several years in Dakar operating theatres and 400,000 FCFA for a goitre operation never performed: the Abass Ndao arrests of September 2025
Dakar is the centre of Senegal's medical training and hospital system, and Abass Ndao is one of the capital's public hospitals. An operating theatre is meant to be the most tightly controlled room in any health service: everyone inside it has a recognised qualification and a defined role. The case below, reported by Seneweb and Leral in September 2025, shows what happens when that assumption goes untested for years.
According to Seneweb, on 22 September 2025 the research brigade of the Keur Massar gendarmerie company arrested three men and placed them in custody: a 49-year-old from Keur Massar, a 48-year-old from Thiaroye and a 47-year-old from Pikine. They had presented themselves as a nursing assistant, an operating-theatre nursing assistant and an operating-theatre assistant. Instead of assisting qualified staff, Seneweb reported, they had performed surgical acts themselves, including circumcisions that caused serious complications in several patients. The Pikine-Guédiawaye prosecutor had ordered the brigade to investigate after complaints, and gendarmes who visited Abass Ndao the same day confirmed the facts.
The 49-year-old is accused of taking 400,000 FCFA from a goitre patient due for an operation since December 2024. The operation never took place, and according to Seneweb the professor who heads the operating block warned that the delay exposed her to serious complications. The three face charges of usurpation of the function and identity of doctor, illegal practice of medicine and endangering the lives of others, and Leral reported that the file went to the Pikine-Guédiawaye prosecutor's office. Leral also reported several years of illegal practice in Dakar facilities including Abass Ndao, and sources told Seneweb the men had worked in some Dakar clinics without legal approval or proper training.
A surgical-block official told Seneweb the practice was an old one he had found in place when he arrived, and said he had always refused to work with the men; Leral quoted the phrase 'vieille habitude'. Some hospital managers told investigators they had been unaware. The check that failed was the simplest one: matching a claimed qualification to a document and a registration before letting anyone near a patient. Senegal's other side of the problem, a nursing diploma bought abroad for a promotion at a Dakar health centre, is recorded elsewhere on this site.
For a student or family weighing medicine abroad, familiarity is no substitute for verification. Check a college, a hospital and an individual against the regulator's own register, not against what colleagues or agents say. Never hand cash to an individual for a service an institution should provide; pay the institution and keep the receipt. Keep your original certificates, and remember that a title used for years is not evidence that it was ever earned.
Were you affected by this case, or something like it? Report it with your own evidence, or tell your story — first-person accounts are what stop the next family.
This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.