Sierra Leone

A journalist in Sierra Leone has been imprisoned after criticising President Ernest Bai Koroma's handling of the Ebola outbreak, according to news reports and local journalists. David Tam Baryoh was arrested on Monday. Baryoh, host of the popular weekly "Monologue" radio programme aired on the independent Citizen FM, was arrested in his office by police who did not have a warrant, according to...

The Freetown high court has cautioned and discharged Independent Observer managing editor Jonathan Leigh and editor Bai Bai Sesay after pressuring them into pleading guilty to a single count of conspiracy to defame the president. “Sierra Leone’s justice system took more than ten hearings to drop this case (on March 10),” said Cléa Kahn-Sriber, the head of the Reporters Without Borders...

Police in Sierra Leone have arrested three suspects, including a police officer, for the killing of a reporter this Sunday during violent clashes over a land dispute on the outskirts of the capital, Freetown, according to local journalists. Ibrahim Foday, 38, a reporter at the private daily newspaper The Exclusive, was beaten and stabbed by assailants during an outbreak of violence between...

The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) has condemned threats by the country's authorities to prosecute Sylvia Olayinka Blyden, publisher of Awareness Times, a privately-owned Freetown-based newspaper, with the antiquated criminal libel law. According to SLAJ, the use of the seditious criminal libel law is illegal and a threat to media freedom and free expression. The Media Foundation...