AFP Sudan office raided; journalist held

Armed security agents on Friday raided the AFP bureau
 in Khartoum and arrested a part-time correspondent
who had taken pictures of an anti-regime protest.

-BangkokPost
Armed security agents on Friday raided the AFP bureau in Khartoum and arrested a part-time correspondent who had taken pictures of an anti-regime protest. The two agents from the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), one of them wielding a pistol, seized Talal Saad, a local journalist who had just begun work as a temporary correspondent for the agency, at about 1550 GMT. They claimed he would come back in two hours.

The raid took place shortly after Saad arrived at the AFP office with pictures he had taken of an anti-regime protest in Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman.

The NISS refused to let the AFP staff correspondent make a telephone call, and threatened to seize every computer in the bureau unless the pictures were deleted. AFP complied with the request. Saad is a Sudanese journalist with the local newspaper Al Tayar. National Security agents last week held AFP correspondent Simon Martelli for more than 12 hours without charge after he talked to students and took pictures at the University of Khartoum, where protests sparked by inflation began two weeks ago. A correspondent for international news wire Bloomberg, Salma El Wardany, an Egyptian, was deported by Sudan on Tuesday, after also being detained while trying to cover the country's widening protest movement.