Algeria: Rally for jailed journalist

Last updated on September 11th, 2021 at 08:31 am

Demonstrators in Algiers are calling for international strain to assist get Algerian journalist Khaled Drareni out of jail.

The journalist, who is 40, was sentenced on August twenty-fourth to three years in prison. He had been in detention seeing that March.

“The profession and journalists are mobilized to demand the release of Khaled Drareni,” Amar Belho uchet, an Algerian journalist and former director of the French-language daily El Watan, explained.

“Khaled Drareni, his region is no longer in prison, his region is in the newsroom of his site, his vicinity is with his journalists. It is insupportable that he still stays in jail today.”

“The Khaled Drareni Support Committee these days organized this rally for press freedom, for the freedom of Khaled Drareni who was, as we know, sentenced to three years in prison,” Kenza Khatto, a journalist, said.

“It is an unjust and cruel condemnation, it is a political condemnation, if we favor to be honest.”

Drareni is a newspaper editor and a correspondent for French TV.

He has been charged of “inciting an unarmed gathering” and “endangering national unity” after masking protests of the Hirak opposition movement, which has marched against the authorities for more than a year.

Reporters Without Borders has condemned his sentence as “arbitrary, absurd and violent”.

(AFP)