The president of Gambia has threatened to “slit the throats” of the any gay people in the country, adding, “no white person can do anything about it.”

President Yahya Jammeh, who seized power of the African country in a military coup in 1994, made the comments during a nationwide agricultural tour of the North Bank Region.

Jammeh told an audience in the town of Farafeni “If you do it [in the Gambia] I will slit your throat — if you are a man and want to marry another man in this country and we catch you, no one will ever set eyes on you again, and no white person can do anything about it,” reports Vice News.

International commentators have suggested that the latest crackdown on homosexuals is an attempt to distract from the struggling economy and to bolster public support for Jammeh.

The Gambian leaders hit the headlines in 2014 after he called gay people “vermins”, vowing to fight them “the same way we are fighting malaria-causing mosquitoes, if not more aggressively” as well as claiming that Aids and HIV can be cured with natural herbal remedies.