Four foreign journalists, one of them a winner of an OPC Foundation scholarship, were arrested at 7:30 a.m. March 14 in the SANA’A, Yemen apartment they shared on charges of “residing illegally in Yemen” and were deported from the country.
They had been living and working in Yemen for several years and were known to authorities including the information ministry. They were two British, Oliver Holmes, a stringer for the Wall Street Journal and Time; and Portia Walker, a Washington Post stringer; and Americans Haley Sweetland Edwards, who writes for the Los Angeles Times and AOL News, and Joshua Maricich, who writes for several publications including the Yemen Times.
The OPC Freedom of the Press Committee sent a letter on their behalf, writing in part: “it is a fruitless thing to try and stop the flow of information.”
Edwards won the OPC’s Irene Corbally Kuhn scholarship in 2009 when she was a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her winning essay dealt with the question of how new media technologies can “provide the world’s people with more voice not more violence.”
For several weeks before their arrests, the four correspondents were covering protests calling for the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Haley Sweetland Edwards’ blog >>