A Malawian journalist has been sacked from an Islamic radio station for broadcasting an interview with wives of five alleged al-Qaeda members deported last month from the southern African country under US orders, a radio official said on Thursday.
Radio Islam’s chief reporter Lameck Masina was dismissed after he defied orders not to air the interview in which the women revealed details of a meeting they held with President Bakili Muluzi after the arrest of their spouses, station manager Hub-Eddin Abbakar said.
They said Muluzi had invited them to his private residence and apologised to them for the controversial arrests of their husbands.
The five alleged members of Osama bin Laden’s network — a Sudanese, two Turks, a Saudi and a Kenyan — were flown to Sudan last month.
Masina ordered the broadcast of the interview twice on Tuesday, even after some unidentified government officials had ordered the private radio station not to repeat the interview in the evening.
A reporter at the station said that Muluzi was apparently angry with the interview and Masina was dismissed for ”shaming the president”.
Ella, the wife of the Turkish national Arif Ulusam, had told the radio that Muluzi had invited her and Salidali, wife of the Sudanese national Mahumud Sardar Issa — to the president’s private residence where he apologised and blamed the Americans for the predicament of their husbands.
”The President was very apologetic. He said he was sorry, it was not the Malawi government, it was the Americans,” Ella told Radio Islam, which opened in 2002.
Muluzi, himself a Muslim, had earlier defended the extradition of the five, saying it was in the best interests of the southern African nation.
He said his government had an international obligation to hand them over to US authorities.
The expulsion of the five in a joint operation by US and Malawian intelligence agents sparked violent demonstrations by Malawi’s Muslim minority and strong protests from humans rights groups which demanded to know where the detainees had been taken.
Earlier this month, even Muluzi said he had no idea where the five were being held.
Intelligence sources said the detainees had been on a US Central Intelligence Agency ”watch list” since the 1998 bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but relatives of the Kenyan strongly denied he had any connection to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. – Sapa-AFP