AliHama

NRT reporter Aram Bakhtyar has been detained by Kurdish authorities yet the perpetrators behind an arson attack on NRT in 2011 still remain at large, Kurdish parliamentarian Ali Hama Salih said. “Journalists murderers, those who set NRT on fire, Baath regime supporters, Anfal campaigners, those who made people hungry and stole their wealth are not brought to justice or detained, rather they stand against people’s voting and disrupt their conscience”, Salih said in a post on his official Facebook account. “What is being done today towards you [NRT] serves the ugly system of governance in Kurdistan”, Kurdish lawmaker Salih said. Bakhtyar was detained by police in Kifri on Monday (May 22), after the Judicial Council filed a lawsuit against the NRT reporter in Kifri on May 3 following a report on a man who was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Bakhtyar was told that he was being detained on the charge of “defamation” and through a lawsuit from the president of Kirkuk-Garmyan appellate court, Akram Faraj. The report documented how a man was taken into custody in 2016 after confessing to the crime of stealing 14 times in a number of shops in Kifri and who blamed his lack of income due to the government’s austerity measures. Following the detention of the NRT employee, the court issued an arrest warrant for the channel’s director regarding the same report on the court case.