A Yemeni journalist accused of advising an Al-Qaeda cleric alleges he was kidnapped and tortured by the state. Iona Craig reports
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The building of 14 October, a Yemeni national media company, was overrun by soldiers on 21 April in order to confiscate the latest issue of Al-Tariq, a daily newspaper it publishes. The reason for seizing the outlet was that the newspaper ran a story about a raid by soldiers on a police station, which took place the day before in the nearby town of Al-Tawahi. According to Al Tariq’s report, the raid was the result of a dispute between a police and a soldier during an operation to remove illegally-built homes outside Al-Tawahi.
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.
Khaled al Jahafi, a journalist with the news website al Sahwa (the Awakening) was arrested on 27 December 2009 whilst covering clashes between security forces and separatists in the southern province of Dhala. Free expression organisations have called on the Yemeni government to release him immediately, and local sources have suggested that he was beaten by police officers upon his detention. Al Jahafi also teaches at Dhala University, where the authorities had previously tried to arrest him on October.
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