Sudan jails three southern journalists

KHARTOUM, June 22 (Reuters) – Sudanese authorities arrested three southern Sudanese journalists on Wednesday and jailed them for not having the right paperwork, their lawyer and editor said.

The three reporters work for the Juba Post, set up in January as the first independent southern-based newspaper. It prints in English and publishes weekly.

“We don’t know exactly the charges against them,” Juba Post Editor-in-Chief Bullen Kinyi told Reuters from the southern town of Juba. “We heard that they didn’t have the correct registration with the national press council,” he said.

Sudan revoked the licence of the only English-language opposition daily, the Khartoum Monitor, earlier this month, in a move condemned by rights group and the United Nations.

The Khartoum Monitor also deals mostly with southern Sudanese issues.

Kinyi said he hoped his paper would have been the start of a free press in Sudan, as enshrined in January’s peace deal ending more than two decades of civil war in the south and paving the way for democracy in Africa’s largest country.

Lawyer Kulam Jarboum Meshwar said the journalists, Charles Lugania, Angelo Wello and Joseph Aligo, were in prison in Khartoum.