The police in Aweil town of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State Friday detained Paulino Angok Garang, a freelance journalist based in Aweil, for more than eight hours and later released him.
According to Angok, the state security advisor Akook Aleu, who is locally known as Akook Manyiel, ordered security forces to drag him out of the celebration venue and detain him.
"I woke up in the morning in my residential area and I went to the grounds where the event was taking place. I had my phone with me and I used it to take photos. Then the governor's security advisor came and ordered the security officers to take me away,” he said.
Angok said he was not tortured but spent almost nine hours behind bars without any investigations.
For his part, the Northern Bahr el Ghazal State security advisor Akook Aleu said, "That journalist was not arrested, he was brought to me and I released him immediately. He was approaching the visiting presidential affairs minister as a drunken person, and there was no one informed us that he is a journalist."
Meanwhile, Majak Daniel, the secretary-general for the Union of Journalists in South Sudan (UJoSS) condemned the arrest and urged the state authorities to follow due process before and after arresting any journalist.
“Instead of just arresting and embarrassing someone in front of the entire public and later on you find out there was nothing genuine to arrest this person, if someone has done wrong, you should go to the police and then the police will issue the warrant of arrest and we as a union, we strongly condemned this in strongest terms possible,’’ Daniel said.