The repression of journalists continues in Algeria. On the morning of Tuesday, May 11, the security services arrested four journalists, including Khaled Drareni, as well as a photographer during the students’ march in Algiers, said the National Liberation Committee. prisoners (CNLD) on its Facebook page.
Present in Algiers to cover the 116th Tuesday of popular student marches, five journalists were arrested by the police. According to the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees (CNLD), they are Khaled Drareni (Casbah Tribune), Sami Kharoum (El Watan), Feriel Bouaziz (INTERLIGNES), and Mustapha Bastami (El Khabar), as well as the photographer of the media Tariq News Hakim Hammiche.
“They arrested journalists and photographers, even after identity verification, to prevent them from covering the arrests of students and citizens during the march on Tuesday,” denounced the CNLD via its Facebook page.
Arrest of twenty people in Algiers
In addition, we learn that the security services also arrested several students who participated in the march on Tuesday, May 11 in Algiers. The CNLD evokes at least twenty arrests among the participants in the march, “at 2:10 pm in front of the post office of the Agha station”, specifies the same source.
It should be noted that this is not the first time that the police force represses student marches in Algiers. During the last two marches, which took place on May 4 and April 27, several students were picked up by the police even before the start of the march, around the Place des Martyrs.
As a reminder, the Algerian Ministry of the Interior had indicated, in a statement released Sunday, May 9, that the weekly marches would be subject to a request for authorization. Suffice to say that this condition is nothing more than a disguised ban on the Hirak marches, knowing that this popular movement has no organization that supervises it to ask for authorization.