30 October 2008
State TV journalist secretly
sentenced in 2006 to five years of forced labour
Daniel Kibrom, a journalist employed by
Eritrea’s state-owned Eri TV, has been
held since October 2006 in a prison camp in the south of the country, where he
is serving a sentence of five years of forced labour for trying to cross the
border into Ethiopia, Reporters Without Borders has learned from a former
prison interrogator who fled the country a year ago.
“The intolerance and cruelty of the
Eritrean authorities must not go unremarked,”
Reporters Without Borders said. “Daniel Kibrom disappeared into the oblivion of a prison camp hell
created by President Issaias Afeworki and his aides
with the approval of acting information minister Ali Abdu,
who often talks to the international press. We ask him to publicly tell the
personnel under his responsibility and the foreign media what he knows about
the fate of his ministry’s missing employees.”
Daniel, who worked for Eri TV’s Oromo-language service, was arrested
by Eritrean border guards in a desert zone near the southern town of
One of the people who interrogated
him, a member of a counter-espionage service, fled the country in September
2007 and met with Reporters Without Borders in
Run by Commando Unit No. 525, Ala Bazit is located in the middle of a desert behind the
Three metal drums in the courtyard
serve as latrines. Around 50 soldiers guard the 300 prisoners and
interrogations are carried out by members of the “Third Operational Zone”
counter-espionage section.
Barefoot and wearing beige overalls,
the prisoners are fed a lentil soup twice a day. At night they are shut up in
windowless cells four metres by four metres in size, with about 20 or 25
detainees to each cell, where they sleep crammed together on plastic sheets on
the floor. As they are not let out of the cells at night, anyone needing to
urinate must use one of the plastic recipients hanging from the ceiling on a
piece string. Prisoners who die while at the camp are buried in the cemetery of
a military hospital in a nearby locality.
The former prison interrogator told
Reporters Without Borders that Ali Abdu,
the acting information minister, was notified by telephone that Kibrom, one of his ministry’s employees, had been brought
to the camp.
The Kibrom
case means the number of verifiable cases of detained Eritrean journalists or
information ministry employees now stands at 18. According to the information
obtained by Reporters Without Borders, at least four
of the 10 journalists who were arrested in the course of a round-up of
government critics in September 2001 died subsequently in Eiraeiro
high-security prison camp in the north-east of the country. They include the
famous co-founder of the weekly Setit, Fessehaye “Joshua” Yohannes.
Source: Reporters
Without Borders
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