By Ahmed Elumami
Tripoli, 7 March 2013:
Several hundred gunmen stormed Alassema . . .[restrict]TV station this afternoon, Thursday, in Tripoli’s Gurgi district, smashed the place up and kidnapped five members of staff including the channel’s manager and its chief executive officer.
According to Rajab Ben Gazi, one of Alassema’s presenters who was present during the attack those involved were a mix of revolutionaries, Islamists and civilians. “Some of them were shouting ‘the blood of the martyrs will not go in vain’. Others set fire to part of the building and destroyed a lot of the channel equipment,” he said.
Another member of staff told the Libya Herald that some were dressed in uniform and others in civilian clothes. They accused the station of causing fitna – dissension and discord.
The gunmen then seized channel owner Juma Osta and his secretary, Mohamed Atif, its former executive director, Nabil Shebani, and two Alassema presenters, Mohamed Huni and Mahmoud Sharkisi.
Shebani, who is no longer with Alassema, apparently taken for attempting to film the militias as they were seizing Osta.
“They accused us of being linked to Mahmoud Jibril (the head of the National Force Alliance) and said that our manager, Juma Usta, is a Qaddafi loyalists because he worked as manager of a Chamber Commerce and Industry during the Qaddafi regime,” Ben Gazi said.
“The gunmen were asking about the editors of the channel and who was the responsible for the news tickers,” he added.
”They told me to leave Tripoli immediately and return to Misrata.”
The gunmen later released Sharkisi, Huni and Atif. Sharkisi said that he had been treated respectfully and that no one touched or hurt him.
Osta and Shebani are still missing.
Following the attack, a force from the Chief General Staff arrived to assess the situation to take necessary measures to secure the place and assess the damage.
There are allegations circulating in Tripoli this evening linking the attack to Tuesday’s seizure of Congress members and the attempt to force them to pass the “Political Isolation Law” which would ban senior Qaddafi officials from office, and the shooting at Congress President Mohamed Magarief’s car afterwards.
This is not the first attack against Alassema. At the beginning of February, an Alassema TV crew outside the General National Congress building in Tripoli were attacked and beaten by security guards.
Last August, Shebani and two Alassema journalists were arrested by the Supreme Security Committee which objected to the station’s coverage of the destruction by Salafists of the Al-Sha’ab mosque in Tripoli.
Ironically, earlier today before the raid and seizure, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) issued a statement saying that it was deeply concerned about attacks on media organisations in Libya and threats against journalists. It called on Libyans to respect freedom of the press.
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