Friday, November 04, 2005

Libya Reportedly Imprisons Blogger

An AP newswire article by Jasper Mortimer, via Yahoo! News, reports that:

Libya has sent to prison for 18 months a blogger who criticized the government on the Internet, Human Rights Watch says in a report that inspired a series of Web tributes to the dissident Friday.

A Tripoli court convicted Abdel Raziq al-Mansuri of illegal possession of a handgun and sentenced him to 18 months' imprisonment on Oct. 19, the New York-based rights group said in an e-mail to The Associated Press in Cairo.

"The gun charges are a ruse," said the Middle Eastern director of HRW, Sarah Leah Whitson. "The authorities went after al-Mansuri because they did not like what he wrote."

Al-Mansuri, 52, was detained in Tobruk, his hometown, in January after publishing about 50 articles critical of Libyan society and government on a dissident Web site based in Britain, http://www.akhbar-libya.com, the rights group said Thursday.

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