(RSF/IFEX) – Cyber-dissident Abdel Rahman Shagouri was released from jail on 31 August 2005, one week after completing his sentence for “publishing lies”. RSF had condemned his conviction as “utterly unjustified.” “This man spent more than two and a half years in prison and was tortured just for sending news by email,” the organisation said. […]
(RSF/IFEX) – Cyber-dissident Abdel Rahman Shagouri was released from jail on 31 August 2005, one week after completing his sentence for “publishing lies”. RSF had condemned his conviction as “utterly unjustified.”
“This man spent more than two and a half years in prison and was tortured just for sending news by email,” the organisation said.
“We also want to use this occasion to repeat our call for the release of cyber-dissident Massud Hamid, imprisoned in Syria since July 2003,” RSF added.
On 23 February 2003, intelligence officials arrested Shagouri for emailing a newsletter taken from the website http://www.thisissyria.net, which is banned in Syria. On 20 June 2004, the Supreme State Security Court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison. The charge against him specified that the articles he sent had “harmed the image and security of Syria”.
Shagouri served his entire sentence at Saidnaya military prison, where he was reportedly tortured by members of the military secret service.
In addition, journalism student Massud Hamid remains imprisoned at Adra jail, near Damascus. He was arrested on 24 July 2003, one month after the publication of photographs he took on 25 June during a peaceful Kurdish demonstration in front of the Unicef offices in Damascus. The photographs were posted on the Kurdish language site http://www.amude.com.
On 10 October 2004, the State Security Court sentenced him to three years in prison for membership in a secret organisation and attempting to “attach a part of Syrian territory to another country”.
The young man, who has also reportedly been tortured in prison on several occasions, is now in a very poor state of health (see IFEX alerts of 29 June 2005, 12 and 8 October, 22 July, 8 March and 16 February 2004).
