(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Minister of Security Ahmadou Camara, RSF expressed its anger over the assault on photographer Mamadou Cellou Diallo by police officers in Conakry on 4 December 2001. “He is not the first journalist to have been subjected to such treatment. We ask that all necessary steps are taken to put […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Minister of Security Ahmadou Camara, RSF expressed its anger over the assault on photographer Mamadou Cellou Diallo by police officers in Conakry on 4 December 2001. “He is not the first journalist to have been subjected to such treatment. We ask that all necessary steps are taken to put an end to barbaric treatments meted out by the security forces,” stated Robert Ménard, the organisation’s secretary-general. “We fear that the state prosecutor will file away the complaint lodged against Second Lieutenant Amadou Camara,” he added.
According to information collected by RSF, Diallo, a photographer with the private press group Le Lynx-La Lance, was violently assaulted by officers from the Conakry Police’s Special Protection and Intervention Brigade (Brigade spéciale de protection et d’intervention, BSPI) on 4 December. The officers were acting on orders of the BSPI commander, Second Lieutenant Camara, who threatened to kill the journalist if he published his name or image. The journalist was covering the students’ strike at Conakry University. The Le lynx-La Lance group lodged a complaint against Camara for “blows and injuries” on 11 December. In the complaint addressed to the state prosecutor, the journalist explains that he received “at least twenty-five blows from a truncheon and strap.” The police officers also took his watch and 40,000 CFA francs CFA (approx. US$55; 61 euros).
RSF recalls that on 8 May, Tibou Camara, publication director of the weekly
“L’Observateur”, was arrested by Conakry’s anti-gang police, in front of his newspaper’s offices. Several witnesses, including some of the journalist’s colleagues, stated that he was beaten by police officers at the time of his arrest. On 24 April, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of one million Guinean francs (approx. US$523; 590 euros) for “defamation.” Conakry’s High Court sentenced the publication director and five other “L’Observateur” journalists following the filing of a complaint by Malick Sankhon, secretary-general of the Ministry of Tourism. Sankhon had instituted proceedings against the weekly after the publication of an article in which he was accused of seeking to arrange Camara’s abduction. The journalist was released after spending several days in detention (see IFEX alert of 10 May 2001).
