Conflict Incident Report

Three Lebanese men arrested in the southern city of Sidon Saturday after being accused of offending local community members and sheikhs on social media were released Monday, local media reported. Reports said south Lebanon Judge Raheef Ramadan ordered the release of Mahmoud Fanas and Youssef Kleib who had allegedly accused Sidon Mufti Sheikh Salim Sousan on social media of planning to steal money donated to a mosque for the besieged Syrian town of Madaya. The detained men said they merely shared the comments made by someone else. "Facebook is somewhere a person can freely express their opinions... I think what we did was blown out of proportion and our arrests were unnecessary," Kleib told Al-Jadeed. "If they arrested everyone who expressed their opinion on social media 90 percent of the country would be in jail," he added. He said they were taken to Beirut to be interrogated after being arrested by police intelligence. Raheef also ordered the release of Ali Jomaa who was arrested for writing posts on Facebook which allegedly offended some of Sidon’s residents and the city’s sheikhs, “after promising he wouldn’t carry out such acts again.”