Chad court to decide fate of La Voix newspaper

During a hearing, the state deputy prosecutor "asked the court to order the withdrawal of the provisional seizure" of La Voix and the bench announced that it would rule in a week.

On 3 December 2009, an Ndjamena tribunal ordered the seizure of all publications of the newspaper, on the grounds that it broke administrative rules. Chadian authorities then stressed the absence of the managing editor.

On Wednesday, lawyers for La Voix presented the court with decisions taken by managing editor Innocent Ebode and chief editor Eloi Miandadji. Padare said that the defence wants "exactly the same thing as the deputy prosecutor."

Launched in May 2009, La Voix exploys a staff of 10 and has a print run of 2,000 copies, which is a large number in the deeply poor central African country.

Within 10 days, Ebode, a Cameroonian national, and his accountant Amadou Bouba Gong-Daba were kidnapped and beaten up by unidentified men, according to their own accounts to AFP.

Ebode was expelled to the Cameroonian town of Kousseri, on the border with Chad. He was abducted on December 20, interrogated by his captors, and returned from Kousseri on Tuesday, Padare said.

Gong-Daba said he was taken on December 28 left in the wild by four armed men with turbans, who pushed him into a car and took him to "a dark black cell" where they questioned him about the paper and its sources of income.

He said that he was then dumped several dozen kilometres northeast of Ndjamena, adding that it took him a night and a morning to get back to his home in the capital.

Source: AFP

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