Massoud Hamid, winner of 2005 Reporters Without Borders Internet Freedom Prize, released at end of prison sentence

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the release from prison on 23 July of Massoud Hamid, winner of the 2005 Reporters Without Borders - Fondation de France Internet Freedom Prize, at the end of a three-year sentence for posting photos online of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Damascus. It noted that he had been “frequently ill-treated during his totally unjustified” sentence and said it was “disgusting” that he had been jailed simply for exercising his right to speak freely. Hamid, a journalism student, was released a day before his sentence officially ended and returned to his family home in the Kurdish town of Derbesye, in northern Syria. Scores of villagers went to the house to welcome him despite police sent there to prevent them. He was held in solitary confinement during his first year in Adra prison, in a suburb of Damascus, and was not allowed to see a doctor, or read in his cell or wear glasses, which badly damaged his eyesight. He staged several fruitless hunger-strikes in protest, suffers from back pain and is due to have tests in hospital. He had been arrested on 24 July 2003 as he was taking an exam at Damascus University. After a mockery of a trial, the state security court sentenced him on 10 October 2004 to three years in prison for “belonging to a secret organisation” and “trying to annex part of Syria to another country.” A month before he was arrested, he had sent photos of a peaceful demonstration on 25 June that year in front of UNICEF offices in Damascus to a German-based Kurdish-language website (www.amude.com). He won the Internet Freedom prize on 7 December 2005 and had been adopted while in prison by the Maison de la presse in Charleroi (Belgium), the radio station NRJ (Belgium), The Link (Canada), and Spanish media outlets Varios Foros, Periodicom.com, Interviu, and El Mundo, as well as the Colexio de Xornalistas in Galicia. ------------- Create your blog with Reporters without borders: www.rsfblog.org