Ethiopia Releases VOA Correspondent, Drops Charges
A VOA correspondent and his translator were freed Saturday after being detained overnight by Ethiopian police on a charge of “illegal reporting.”
Listen to an interview with veteran VOA correspondent Peter Heinlein. Read the full story.
Heinlein and translator Simegineh Yekoye were arrested Friday as they were leaving a mosque on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Heinlein told VOA editors Saturday he was questioned at length about the purposes of his reporting.
“We were interrogated by a police officer who told us that we had engaged in illegal reporting. They say that this is a problem area that we had gone into, and that reporters had no business going in there,” said Heinlein. “We had a lengthy interrogation and gave a long statement in which he grilled us quite extensively about reporting, and about why, how we had gone to this mosque and what our motives were.”