By Libya Herald staff.
Tripoli, 11 October 2014:
A Libyan poet was released last night just hours after he was seized.
Salah Ngab, who . . .[restrict]is a poet, writer and activist, is an Amazigh from Jebel Nafusa living in Tripoli. The writer runs one of the biggest and most popular Amazigh websites in Libya, which is in both Arabic and Tamazigh. In his late 30s, he is married and the father of one child.
According to a close friend, this was not the first time Ngab had been threatened.
Ngab was taken just hours before Alassema TV presenter Maad Al-Tleeb was grabbed by armed men in military uniform in Tripoli’s Salahaddin district.
Tleeb was reportedly taken to the Libya Dawn-controlled Yarmouk camp, but when his family members inquired about his whereabouts at the camp, officials at the camp denied that he had been taken there.
Two days ago, six members of the same family were also kidnapped in Tripoli. However despite this, Libya Dawn has said that the capital is now safe.
The kidnappings have come just as the monitoring committee in the case of the Tunisian journalists abducted in Libya, Sofiane Chourabi and Nadhir Gtari, announced that it had decided upon an action plan to secure their release. Libyan officials, including the President of HoR and the chargé d’affaires of the Libyan embassy in Tunisia have promised to make every effort to secure the release of the journalists.
Kidnapping as a means of manipulating and intimidating journalists, reporters, writers and activists has reached epidemic proportions in Libya, making accurate reporting and free expression inside the country extremely risky and increasingly rare. [/restrict]