A Burundian journalist, arrested earlier this week by the secret services over an article deemed insulting to the country’s president, has been placed in detention pending trial, his lawyer said on Friday.
”My client Etienne Ndikuriyo, met the public prosecutor Annonciate Twagirayezu, who held a lengthy interrogation,” said the Burundian journalist’s lawyer, Gabriel Sinarinzi.
”The prosecutor decided to transfer him to the central prison (in Bujumbura) while awaiting trial,” he said.
He said he was on trial for ”an attack on the private life and honour and insulting the head of state”.
The information was confirmed by the police and the journalist’s employer, the private radio station Bonesha FM+.
According to colleagues, Ndikuriyo was detained on Tuesday for a report he wrote for Bujumbura’s Zoom-Net newspaper that said President Domitien Ndayizeye suffered depression after his political party was defeated in June 3 local elections.
Ndayizeye’s Front for Democracy in Burundi (Frodebu) lost heavily to the country’s main Hutu ex-rebel group, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), in the municipal elections, the first in a series of polls aimed at selecting new leaders in an
extended peace process.
The small central African nations is struggling to emerge from a 12-year civil war in which some 300 000 people have died.
Two international press freedom watchdogs slammed Burundi for the arrest. – Sapa-AFP