Two Malawian journalists, arrested and charged with publishing false information for reporting that President Bingu wa Mutharika had moved out of a palace because he feared it was being haunted, have been granted bail, their lawyer said on Wednesday.
”They are being released right now on bail. We are at the police headquarters signing the bail,” said lawyer Ian Malera from the administrative capital Lilongwe, where the men were being held.
Raphael Tenthani, who works for the BBC and Mabvuto Banda, a journalist for The Nation newspaper and who also reports for the Reuters news agency, were arrested by armed police at their homes on Tuesday at dawn in Blantyre.
They were driven to Lilongwe under police escort where they were charged with ”publishing false information likely to cause public alarm”.
A third person, Horace Nyaka, who is an aide to Vice President Cassim Chilumpha, was also arrested and charged with the same offence. He too was released on bail, a source said from Lilongwe.
Malera said the case against the journalists, who did not make a court appearance, and have been in police custody since Tuesday, ”might proceed”.
The men did not have to pay bail and were required to report to the Blantyre police once every two weeks, Malera said.
An aide to Mutharika at the weekend told journalists that the president had abandoned the $100-million palace in Lilongwe because he had been hearing ”strange noises that keep him awake or feels rodents crawling all over his body but when he turns on the lights, he sees nothing”.
Mutharika angrily denied the reports when he returned on Saturday from a trip to Belgium, saying: ”I have never feared ghosts in my life.”
The government on Wednesday continued to deny media reports, saying the president was a ”God-fearing man and the articles about the ghosts should be looked upon with contempt”.
It was the first time that journalists have been arrested in Malawi since Mutharika was elected to the presidency in May last year, replacing Bakili Muluzi who had ruled the southern African country since 1994.
The palace, containing about 300 air-conditioned rooms and set in 555ha of land outside the capital, is widely seen as a folly of the country’s founding president Kamuzu Banda.
Muluzi refused to live in the palace, saying it was too extravagant.
Until last year the building housed the Parliament but Mutharika told the lawmakers to move, saying it was intended to be a residence and should ”revert to its original proper use”. – Sapa-AFP