Dakar — The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Cameroonian authorities to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for detaining and violently abusing Nsoyuka Guy-Bruno Maimo, a reporter with the privately owned Volcanic Times newspaper, while he covered a demonstration on October 24.
"The members of Cameroon's gendarmerie responsible for detaining, beating, and subjecting journalist Nsoyuka Guy-Bruno Maimo to degrading treatment must be held accountable," said Angela Quintal, CPJ's Africa program head, in Durban. "The press in Cameroon work in perilous conditions, with the threat of violence and detention hanging over them, and the arrest and abuse of Maimo only reinforces this fear."
Gendarmerie officers in Buea, the capital of the Southwest Region, arrested Maimo while he was covering a demonstration by a local women's group outside the gendarmerie offices and detained him for five days without access to a lawyer or his family, according to the Cameroon Association of English-Speaking Journalists.
Maimo told CPJ that he was released unconditionally on October 29, but that the gendarmes had hit him with their hands and a belt, insulted him, threatened him with imprisonment, and forced him to clean the gendarmeries' toilets. "Every time I tried to explain, I received more beatings," he added. CPJ reviewed photos showing cuts on Maimo's back and his bloodstained shirt.
During his detention, officers accused Maimo of interfering in the work of the gendarmerie and questioned him about the conflict between separatists in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon and the majority French-speaking government, which has claimed several thousand lives since 2017.
Maimo told CPJ that he believed that officers had accessed his phone, which was not password-protected. He also suspected that officials had accessed his WhatsApp account, because friends said it appeared to be active during his detention.
At least five other journalists are currently jailed in Cameroon, with one journalist, Stanislas Désiré Tchoua, released on December 28, 2023, after CPJ's annual prison census was published. Four of them have been held for years on anti-state charges over their coverage in the Anglophone regions.
CPJ's calls to Fenelon Mondo, a member of the gendarmerie's communications team, and emails and calls to the gendarmerie's publicly listed number went unanswered.
