Radio Kapisa director Hojatullah Mujadadi is being subjected to prolonged detention by the Afghan intelligence agency known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Saturday, Mujadadi completed his third month of being held at NDS headquarters in Kabul, where he has not been allowed to see a lawyer, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF).
The NDS and certain officials in the northeastern province of Kapisa, where Mujadadi’s radio station is based, have behaved in an illegal and unreasonable manner in this case. Mujadadi is neither a terrorist, nor an insurgent nor a criminal. He is a respected journalist whose only offence was to upset officials in Kapisa, RSF said.
President Hamid Karzai’s credibility as someone able to enforce respect for the rule of law and guarantee a minimum of security for Afghan journalists is at stake in this case. We urge him to intercede to obtain Mujadadi’s release, RSF said.
NDS spokesman Saeed Ansari told RSF that the NDS has the right to detain “any suspect in a terrorism case for an indefinite period.” After confirming that Mujadadi’s case had been sent to the prosecutor, he promised the press freedom group to reexamine the case file to see if there was any possibility of Mujadadi being released quickly.
Since his arrest on the day of the most recent parliamentary elections on September 18, Mujadadi’s case has been marked by serious irregularities and barefaced lies by certain officials. RSF discovered that his arrest was carried at former Kapisa governor Ghulam Ghawis Abubaker’s request, with the help of two of his sons-in-law, the parliamentarian Mohammad Eghbal Safi and the NDS representative in Kapisa province, Khajeh Zafar.
The NDS recently claimed that a suspect from Kandahar who is also being held by the security services had accused Mujadadi of being an accomplice of insurgent groups.
