Tag: freed
Jordan Envoy Freed By Libyan Militia After Handover Of Jailed Militant

Jordan Envoy Freed By Libyan Militia After Handover Of Jailed Militant

By Laura King and Amro Hassan, Los Angeles Times

CAIRO — Jordan’s ambassador to Libya, abducted by gunmen nearly a month ago in the Libyan capital, arrived safely home in Amman on Tuesday. But the case raised troubling questions about the Libyan government’s ability to resist the demands of armed groups that hold sway in the energy-rich North African nation.

The envoy, Fawaz Itan, said after landing at a Jordanian military airfield that he had been treated well by his captors and was eager to return to his post. Armed assailants had yanked him from his car in central Tripoli on April 15 — one of an escalating series of abductions and other attacks directed against diplomatic personnel and Libyan officials this year.

More than two years after the capture and killing of fallen strongman Moammar Gadhafi, chaos reigns in Libya. Rival militias act with impunity, with the weak central government unable to rein them in. Some of the groups have nominal ties to the Libyan government but are not answerable to it.

Envoys in Tripoli increasingly risk becoming pawns in militias’ demands for the freeing of jailed colleagues. Itan’s captors had demanded the release of Islamist militant Mohamed Dersi from a Jordanian prison, and Agence France Presse quoted a Jordanian official as saying Dersi had been handed over to Libyan authorities.

Jordan characterized Dersi’s release as part of a prisoner exchange between the two governments, rather than a trade made with the militia to win Itan’s freedom.

Dersi, who allegedly has links to al-Qaida, had been serving a seven-year sentence in Jordan for plotting a suicide attack at Amman’s international airport. The kingdom’s minister of political and parliamentary affairs, Khaled Kalaldeh, told AFP he would serve the remainder of his sentence in Libya.

But this marked the second time in recent months that militias were able to pressure foreign governments to hand over prisoners.

In January, five Egyptian diplomats in Tripoli were seized as hostages by a militia group known as the Libyan Revolutionary Operations Room, which demanded the release of its leader, Shaaban Hediya, who had been arrested in Egypt days earlier. The group subsequently announced that Hediya had been released by Egypt and freed the diplomats.

©afp.com / Abdullah Doma

Pussy Riot Women Vow To Fight On After Release

Moscow (AFP) – The two jailed members of anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot, whose imprisonment prompted a wave of global outrage, walked free on Monday and immediately vowed to fight injustice in Russian prisons.

Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were released two months early under a Kremlin-backed amnesty after serving most of their two-year sentences.

They immediately slammed the measure as a publicity stunt before the Olympic Games Russia will host in February.

“I don’t think the amnesty is a humanitarian act, I think it’s a PR stunt,” the 25-year-old Alyokhina said.

The pair, who both have small children, and fellow activist Yekaterina Samutsevich were convicted on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after staging a “punk prayer” in an Orthodox cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. During the event, they asked the Virgin Mary to get rid of President Vladimir Putin.

Alyokhina was quietly whisked away from her prison colony in the city of Nizhny Novgorod while Tolokonnikova, 24, emerged in style and faced a media scrum a few hours later from a prison hospital in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.

Wearing fishnet stockings despite temperatures of minus 25 degrees C (-13 F) and hair perfectly coiffed, Tolokonnikova said her prison time only made her more resolute in opposing Putin’s rule.

“I don’t consider this time wasted,” the brunette said. “I became older, I saw the state from within, I saw this totalitarian machine as it is.”

“Russia is built on the model of a penal colony and that is why it is so important to change the penal colonies today to change Russia,” she said.

She pledged to defend prisoners’ rights along with bandmate Alyokhina, saying “we would like to pursue a joint project together.

“Right now we will be discussing the structure and format of this project,” Tolokonnikova said in an interview with Echo of Moscow radio.

Tolokonnikova wants to spend at least a week in Krasnoyarsk where her grandmother lives, and Alyokhina planned to join her in the Siberian city on Tuesday.

Alyokhina used her first interview after her release to slam the amnesty as a mere publicity “stunt,” and said that she would have preferred to remain in prison but wasn’t given a choice.

“If I had a choice to refuse [the amnesty], I would have, without a doubt,” Alyokhina told Dozhd television channel.

The two women were freed three days after the shock release of anti-Kremlin tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent more than a decade behind bars.

Alyokhina’s release was marked by the same kind of security as the secret operation that freed Khodorkovsky, who was not seen after his release until he touched down at a Berlin airport on Friday afternoon.

She was taken away from the prison without saying goodbye to her fellow inmates and eventually made her way to the offices of local NGO Committee Against Torture to discuss violations at the colony.

Still wearing prison garb, Alyokhina said she had no regrets. “I am not sorry, I am proud of what we did.”

If the chance arose to stage the church stunt again, “we would sing the song to the end,” she said. “You have to listen to the whole thing, not just the first verse.”

Tolokonnikova, meanwhile, urged countries to boycott the February Olympics.

If the amnesty were wider, she said, Western countries could view it as a reason not to boycott the Olympic Games. “As it stands, I appeal for a boycott, I appeal for honesty, I appeal for not being bought for oil and gas,” she said.

Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” was staged just prior to Putin’s re-election to the Kremlin in March 2012 and was aimed at denouncing the Orthodox Church’s support of the Russian strongman during the campaign.

The group also released a video clip of their performance which is now banned.

All three were arrested in early March 2012. Samutsevich was later freed on appeal with a suspended sentence, but Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were sent to faraway penal colonies.

Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, whose sentences would have run out in early March, were granted the amnesty last week after parliament approved a Kremlin-backed bill.

Their jailing turned them from little-known feminist punks who staged a handful of guerrilla performances in Moscow to the stars of a global cause celebre symbolizing the repression of civil dissent under Putin.

They received support from luminaries ranging from Madonna to Yoko Ono to Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

The case also polarized Russian society, with Orthodox conservatives getting into fights with Pussy Riot supporters during the trial, and even staging rallies of their own.

Freed Hikers Highlight American Hypocrisy

Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer — the two American hikers who were freed last week after more than two years of imprisonment in Iran — held a revealing press conference this morning that shined a light on the United States’ hypocritical national security policies.

Fattal and Bauer began by describing their horrible treatment while imprisoned in Iran, saying that “we have been held in almost total isolation from the world and everything we love, stripped of our rights and freedom. … Solitary confinement was the worst experience of our lives.” Fattal went on to say that “[m]any times, too many times, we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten and there was nothing we could do to help them.”

If their ordeal sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because it is so similar to the way that the United States treats its prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons across the globe. The United States holds detainees for years at a time without any hope of due process, and has been unapologetic about using torture to interrogate prisoners.

Indeed, that irony was not lost on Fattal and Bauer. As Bauer explained:

“In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments — including the government of Iran — to act in kind.”

Bauer is exactly right. The United States’ deplorable treatment of its detainees does not justify Iran’s, but it should not go unnoticed in this story. How can the United States criticize Iran’s treatment of American prisoners, when it would treat suspected Iranian spies captured in the United States in almost the exact same manner?

The mere fact that the United States’ human rights record can now be reasonably compared to Iran’s is an embarrassment. When Senator Obama was running for president, he promised to close Guantanamo Bay and end the use of torture on detainees. As Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer have reminded us, we’re still waiting for him to follow through.