A six-month jail sentence has been passed by a court in Tébessa (460 km east of Algiers) on Rabah Lamouchi, the local correspondent of the national Arabic-language daily Ennahar, on charges of lacking press accreditation and defamation. Lamouchi has been held since his arrest on June 9.
“These are trumped-up charges,” Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said. “In the absence of a national press card, it is the news media, not the Algerian authorities, who issue press accreditation to their own employees. In this case, the authorities are clearly trying to suppress information that Lamouchi has been reporting in his articles.”
Ennahar editor Anis Rahmani told RSf, “This is a case of an abuse by local judicial authorities that undermines press freedom in Algeria. If Lamouchi had not had our newspaper’s accreditation, we would have had to sue him for impersonation.”
Rahmani added: “This is the first time that a journalist has been detained before his trial, before a court decided whether or not he was guilty. There is no doubt that the Tébessa district security chief was behind this sentence.”
