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Conflict Incident Report
Armed raid to arrest journalist a ‘scandal,’ activist says
On December 10, 2018, 10 police officers belonging to Lebanon's Internal Security Forces (ISF) raided the Beirut office of the independent online news website Daraj and detained Hazem el-Amin, the website's co-founder and editor-in-chief, for two hours following a visit by an ISF investigator, according to news reports, el-Amin, and Skeyes.
El-Amin was quoted by Skeyes as saying that an ISF investigator showed up at the office in connection to a lawsuit over some material published on Daraj earlier in 2018. The prosecutor had dropped the lawsuit against the website.
"When I refused to comment on this, he requested information about the owners of Daraj and I said I would do that only in the presence of a lawyer and he left. Shortly afterwards, he left and 10 armed ISF officers stormed into the office and treated other fellow journalists harshly. They took me from the building, put me in a car, handcuffed me, and drove me to the Verdun barracks, where the interrogator told me that the investigator had accused me of being hostile towards him and using inappropriate words. I signed a statement confirming I hadn't treated anybody in a hostile manner and was released two hours later," el-Amin said to Skeyes.
On his Facebook account, el-Amin wrote that Daraj respects the right of anybody they report on to bring them to court, but "what happened today resembles the methods of police states where the security forces that are supposed to represent the rule of law treat journalists rudely and harshly."