Journalists flee to Kenya

The Ethiopian Free Press Journalists’ Association (EFJA) says three Ethiopian journalists have fled the country and taken refugee in Kenya, according to a report in the Ethiopian newspaper ‘Addis Tribune’ on 13 July. The three, Garuma Bekele, Tesfaye Deresa and Solomon Nemera, who formerly worked for the Amharic-language newspaper ‘Urji’, had been in custody for nearly four years and were released in May and June. The journalists said they had fled because they believed they would not receive a fair trial, said the paper. They were arrested in 1997 and accused of terrorist activities, after ‘Urji’ covered the alleged killing by government forces of three members of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), an armed opposition group, ‘Addis Tribune’ said. The programme director of the Network for the Defence of Independent Media in Africa (NDIMA), Sam Mbure, told IRIN that the three are in Kenya seeking political asylum and had approached NDIMA last week for assistance.