Turkish authorities detained two Lebanese journalists Tuesday who were finalizing a documentary in the Syrian border town of Kobani, a friend of one of them said.
LBC reporter Firas Hatoum and freelancer Rony Rmeiti were taken into custody by Turkish authorities after reentering the country from Kobani, Al-Jadeed journalist Bassel Aridi told The Daily Star.
Aridi, who received the information from sources close to Hatoum, could not verify the exact cause behind the arrest.
“There was a problem with the way they entered Kobani and the way they left it,” he said, without disclosing more details.
The two journalists were supposed to leave Kobani Sunday, but bad weather conditions delayed their departure. Kobani witnessed months of fierce clashes between Kurdish groups, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, and Daesh until the jihadi group retreated earlier this month.
Ankara jails more journalists than any other country in the world, according to monitoring groups. The Committee to Protect Journalists counted 221 journalists behind bars in Turkey in 2014.
It is not the first time that Hatoum was taken into custody as a result of his work.
In 2006, Hatoum was charged with tampering with criminal evidence after he allegedly broke into the house of Mohammad Zuheir Siddiq, a former witness involved in the ongoing investigation into former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s murder.
Siddiq is accused of providing false testimony to tribunal investigators which implicated four Lebanese generals in Hariri’s death.
The generals were arrested in 2005 and jailed for four years until their release in 2009 after it emerged that the evidence against them was cooked.
