Cyberdissident Abdel Razak al Mansuri released

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the release from prison on 2 March of Abdel Razak al Mansouri, who was given an amnesty. He had been arrested on 12 January 2005 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. His release was due in June. The managers of the website Akhbar Libya (www.akhbar-libya.com) for which al Mansuri worked regularly said he had now rejoined his family in Tobruk and was in good health. Al Mansouri, a former bookseller, was sentenced in October 2005 for “unauthorised possession of a gun”. Reporters Without Borders had called this charge a “pretext for silencing a dissident voice”. In fact the conviction of the cyberdissident was most likely due to articles posted on the Internet that were critical of the Libyan government. A total of 131 prisoners of opinion were released on the same day, most of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood. ------------- 13.01.06 Cyber-dissident Al Mansouri completes a year in prison On the first anniversary of cyber-dissident Abdel Razak Al Mansouri's arrest, Reporters Without Borders today reiterated its call for the immediate release of this former bookseller, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence for posting articles critical of President Muammar Gaddafi on the Internet. “Al Mansouri has become the symbol of the fight for free expression in Libya,” the organisation said. “By using the Internet to publish independent news and information, he opened a way which many other Internet users are bound to follow.” Aged 52, Al Mansouri was arrested in the eastern city of Tobruk on the night of 12 January 2005 and was transferred two days later to a prison in Tripoli. Since then, he has never been allowed to see his family. He was given the 18-month prison sentence by Tripoli court on 19 October for “unauthorised possession of a pistol.” But the real reason for his arrest and conviction was almost certainly the articles he had been writing for nearly a year for a dissident website based in London, http://www.akhbar-libya.com , in which he raised social issues and criticised human rights abuses by the Libyan authorities. A release posted on the Akhbar Libya website says a petition for Al Mansouri's release was signed by nearly 200 people living in the Tobruk region and sent to the Gaddafi Foundation, which is headed by the president's son. Akhbar Libya said this was unprecedented in Libya. ------------- Create your blog with Reporters without borders: www.rsfblog.org