SOMALIA: Journalist detained for a month in Puntland

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

NAIROBI, 21 May 2004 (IRIN) - An editor of an independent weekly newspaper, in the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland, northeastern, Somalia, has been in detention for over a month, the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported.

According to the CPJ, Abdishakur Yusuf Ali, editor of the War-Ogaal, has been in jail without charge after he was arrested on 21 April because the paper had published an article accusing a minister of corruption.

Local journalists told the CPJ that Abdishakur was being held in an overcrowded and unsanitary cell, and that he is being pressured to sign a statement admitting to publishing false information.

"We are extremely concerned about our colleague, Abdishakur Yusuf Ali," CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said in a statement. "We call on Puntland authorities to release him immediately."

On 10 May, two journalists working for a local radio station in Jowhar, 90 km north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, who had been arrested by armed men, were released. Abshir Ali and Abdighani Shaykh Muhammad said they had been arrested on the orders of local leaders who were unhappy with a report that was aired about the Somali peace process.

"We were picked up from our premises on Thursday morning by security people," Abshir said, adding that the local leaders had "taken exception to a report we carried on Wednesday about the IGAD [Inter-Governmental Authority on Development] meeting on Somalia [in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi]. We reported that IGAD had asked faction leaders to return to the [peace] talks."

This was not the first time that Abshir had been detained by the authorities in Jowhar for a report on the Somali peace process. "I was arrested for 14 hours in February, also on a report about the peace process that they [local leaders] found to be not to their liking," he told IRIN at the time.

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