14/3/2019
A group of bodyguards of Undersecretary of oil, Karim Hattab, severely beaten (Ali al-Taie) Inews cameraman, and prevented his colleagues from coverage in the city of Mosul.
A Fallujah cameraman in Mosul, Saif Manaf al-Al Tikriti, told the Iraqi Press Freedom Advocacy Association, “(Ali) was trying to take a special statement from the deputy minister, but he was prevented more than once by the bodyguards who, several times, pushed him away. After confiscating his camera it was returned broken when his colleagues interfered to calm down the situation. Karim Hattab summoned the photographer Ali to clarify the matter and then ordered his guards to severely beat him where they left him with broken fingers.
The Association, strongly deploring the exposure of the colleague (Ali al-Taie) and his colleagues in Mosul, by the undersecretary of oil and his guards, calls on the minister of Oil personally Thamer Ghadhban to intervene immediately and open a direct investigation into the incident and refer the perpetrators to the security and judicial authorities, the fact that The attack is a clear violation of the law and the Iraqi constitution and passively passing on the incident is a cover-up for this breach.
The association calls on political leaders, influential personalities and state institutions to protect the security and freedom of journalistic work, rather than targeting and using the judiciary to stifle journalists, and calls on journalists to support them in order to amend the draft of publication crimes that the Association completed and handed over to the presidency of the House of Representatives, the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, in order to curb the persecution that falls under the name of the law.
