TEL AVIV – The Algerian government on Monday released blogger Marzoug Touati after he embarked on a hunger strike last summer in protest over the seven-year prison term he received for interviewing an Israeli Foreign Ministry official.
“Today, blogger Marzoug Touati was freed after a criminal court sentenced him to two years in prison, which he already served, in addition to a three-year suspended sentence,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ MENA) posted on its Middle East and North Africa Twitter feed.
“Marzoug Touati was initially handed a 10 year prison sentence on charges of ‘intelligence with a foreign power’ after the blogger interviewed an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Today, he finally walks free,” said CPJ.
Touati’s release comes as Algerians take to the streets to protest an additional term of the country’s 82-year-old president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999. The ailing president, who is set to take up a fifth five-year term, is currently in Switzerland receiving medical treatment.
According to an article published on CPJ, the blogger was arrested at his Béjaïa home on January 18, 2017.
The London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily said security forces had interrogated Touati about a YouTube video he published on January 9, 2017, that shows an interview he conducted via teleconference with Hasan Kaabiah, an Arab-Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson.
“In that interview, the official said Israel has had a liaison office in Algiers since before 2000. Algeria and Israel do not have full diplomatic relations, and Algeria’s government is frequently critical of Israeli actions,” the CJP article said.
During Touati’s interview with Kaabiah, the journalist asked for the official’s reaction to then Algerian Housing and Urban Development Minister Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s allegations that planned protests against inflation were organized by foreign countries, including Israel, and that Israel was behind the Arab Spring.
Touati began serving his sentence at the Oued Ghir prison in Béjaïa. According to media reports and Amnesty International, Touati was held in solitary confinement and had to purchase his own food because authorities barely fed him. On November 3, 2018, Touati was transferred to a prison in the Algerian province of Bouira, according to news reports and a Facebook post by his lawyer, Salah Dabouz.
The judge refused Touati’s multiple requests to summon witnesses who could have an integral role in the case, Dabouz wrote on Facebook. The judge also refused to release the journalist on a provisional basis, according to Dabouz.
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