Yemeni security forces yesterday arrested Hisham Bushraheel, editor of the independent daily Al-Ayyam, along with his son Hani in the souther city of Aden. Acting on the orders of the prosecutor’s office, security forces entered the newspaper’s office and took both men into custody, flying them out to the capital Sana’a the same day. These arrests come on the back of the detention of another of Hisham Bushraheel’s sons, Mohammed, who has been in custody since Monday, when security forces began their seige of the newspaper’s offices.
Meanwhile, journalists from various media companies throughout Yemen had staged a sit-in protest in the Al-Ayyam compund in protest at the daily’s suspension since May 2009. Army and police forces had allegedly used live ammunition to quell increasingly vocal protests, and the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that two people were indeed killed along with nine injured. Authorities claimed the shots came from protestors and Al-Ayyam security guards, something the newspaper and it’s lawyer, Mohammed al-Amrawi, vociferously deny.
