The violence against journalists has been continuing in Yemen.
In one of the latest incidents, security forces assaulted Zaki Saqladi, a correspondent of the news website AlmasdarOnline, Tuesday in the southern province of Ad-Dali, confiscating his car and his camera, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF).
Swiss Info correspondent Abdel-Karim Salam was the victim of a particularly violent attack while covering a sit-in outside Sana'a university on February 20 and had to be hospitalised.
Eighteen employees of Al-Yaqeen, an independent newspaper based in Aden, were arbitrarily arrested on February 18 and taken to the Aden governorate security headquarters. Editor Abdullah Masleh said the arrests were carried out by a special unit assigned to combating piracy and banditry. The newspaper had given the recent demonstrations a lot of coverage, naming people who had been killed or injured. It also published interviews with the head of the Socialist Party parliamentary group and a political scientist, who discussed the possibility of the Egyptian revolution spreading to Yemen. This is the second arrest of a large number of journalists in a month. Fifteen were arbitrarily arrested at the end of January.
On February 18, a group of ruling party supporters attacked Hamoud Munser, the head of the Sana'a bureau of the Dubai-based satellite TV station Al-Arabiya, and an Al-Arabiya cameraman, who was hospitalised. Awsan Al-Qaatabi, the correspondent of Iran’s Al-Alam TV, and Qatar TV cameraman Yasser Al-Maamari were also attacked while covering a demonstration in the Sana'a district known as Kentucky.
Bushra Al-Maqtari, a freelancer who works for the Marebpress website, was injured by fragments of a grenade thrown by ruling party supporters in the southern city of Taez on February 18. She was covering a sit-in by demonstrators on a square they have dubbed “Liberation Square” in honour of the Egyptian uprising. Tom Finn, a reporter for the London-based Guardian newspaper, was attacked on February 17 by a group of men armed with sticks, who tried to take his camera.
