The group said the journalists and bloggers were arrested in late April 2014.
Advertisement
Ethiopian authorities have released five bloggers and journalists after they spent more than a year in prison, but four others remain behind bars.
“I am also concerned for the journalists who remain in jail”, he said.
“We accepted the decision; there are a lot of questions to be raised”, Mekonnen said, “for instance, why the other bloggers were not released”.
Alongside an outpouring of joy and disbelief at the news of the bloggers’ release, many on social media urged supporters to take caution in their celebration. The government acted out of “magnanimity”, Redwan said.
“It’s very good news that six journalists and bloggers have been released, though they shouldn’t have been imprisoned in the first place”, said Leslie Lefkow, deputy director for Africa at Human Rights Watch.
Tom Rhodes from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the release, “a welcome turn of events in Ethiopia, where the number of journalists in prison has steadily increased in recent years”.
The Guardian report said that Ethiopia, which is an ally of the West in the face of extremist organizations in the East African region get millions of dollars for the role played by the collision of groups along the lines of the youth organization in Somalia, but it has a record of flagrant in respect of liberties and human rights.
In elections in May, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front coalition, in power since the end of a civil war in 1991, and its allies won every seat in parliament. Their release Wednesday comes before a visit to Ethiopia later this month by US President Barack Obama.
“The prosecutor has withdrawn its charge from five defendants”, Shimeles Kemal, the state minister of communications, said by phone Wednesday from the capital, Addis Ababa.
Another blogger, Soleyana S. Gebremichale, was charged in absentia.
Advertisement
They “are just accomplices where the remaining are the main actors”, he said by phone.
