According to family members, Asiwe was arrested at the Murtala Muhammad Airport in Lagos as he arrived from the United States. He was on the way to a funeral in the Eastern part of Nigeria. Shortly after his arrest, Asiwe was reportedly flown to the State Security Services headquarters to Abuja and detained. He has been allowed no access to lawyers or family members.
The arrest of the publisher of Huhuonline.com comes on the heels of the weeklong detention of another blogger, Jonathan Elendu of Elendureports.com. Elendu was released on Wednesday by the SSS after they had failed to sustain charges of sedition against the Michigan-based blogger. The SSS has, however, held on to his international passports and have threatened to re-arrest him if he continues to publish "subversive" reports against the Yar'adua regime.
Presidency sources confirmed to SaharaReporters that the regime has compiled names of "problematic" websites and their publishers as well as critical online writers and commentators and placed them at points of entry with dedicated secret service agents to pick up Nigerian citizens engaged in critical online publications. More...
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Thank you for writing about this issue. We were so busy trying to get Jonathan Elendu free (first Nigerian blogger detained for 11 days) we didn't know that the huhuonline publisher was under arrest as well.
ReplyDeleteMany of us continue to speak up for humean rights and freedom of speech. Thank you for this story. It will definitely help.
Hi solomonsydelle! Thanks for your comment but I'm afraid I don't deserve any credit for the article since I didn't write it but merely linked to it. I don't know who the author is as the source says that the article was posted by "admin sahara".
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I try to link to articles about bloggers as often as I can since it's really becoming scary to be one these days in some countries.
And all the best in your efforts for Mr. Elendu.