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Osman Mirghani has been sentenced to six months in jail for publishing an article accusing President Omar al-Bashir‘s family of corruption.
A Sudanese court on Monday sentenced a prominent newspaper editor to six months in jail for publishing an article accusing President Omar al-Bashir’s family of corruption, the journalist told AFP.
The court also handed down a three-year suspended jail term against the writer of the piece which was published in 2012.
“The court has ordered me to pay 10,000 Sudanese pounds ($1,428) or go to jail for six months,” Osman Mirghani, editor-in-chief of the independent daily Al-Tayyar, said.
“I have decided not to pay the money, and I am waiting for the authorities to take me to jail.”
Mirghani said that in the article, writer “Mohamed Zine El Abidine accused Bashir’s family of being corrupt”.
After the article was published, Sudan’s powerful National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) filed cases against both Mirghani and El Abidine.
On Monday the court pronounced its sentence.
Mirghani, a US-educated engineer turned journalist, has been regularly targeted for his aggressive style of speaking out against the authorities and over corruption scandals his paper has exposed.
NISS agents often confiscate the entire print runs of editions of Al-Tayyar over articles that they deem inappropriate.
Mirghani was once beaten up by armed men who stormed his office in central Khartoum in July 2014.
In its 2016 report, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Sudan near the bottom of a world press freedom index, saying that the NISS “hounds journalists and censors the print media”.
