Turay, a freelance reporter working for the independent newspaper Punch and the state-owned Daily Mail, as well as the state-owned Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service, was killed sometime between January 9 and January 15 in Kissy, in Freetown’s east end. The exact circumstances of his death are unknown, but colleagues who attended his funeral on February 9 reported that he had bullet holes in his back.
At that time, rebel forces, consisting of members of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and renegade soldiers of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, were systematically murdering journalists, and Turay’s colleagues did not doubt that he had been killed for his work.