An American freelance journalist has been arrested in Turkey after crossing the border from Syria, where she had been filming.
Lindsey Snell was detained by Turkish authorities in early August and charged with “violating a military zone”, according to a US state department spokesman who confirmed that she had been detained.
In a Facebook posting dated 5 August, Snell related how she had been abducted while working in Syria two weeks before, but had managed to excape from her cave prison. Her captors were an Islamist group, Jabhat al Nusra, formerly an affiliate of al-Qaida, but now known as the Levant Conquest Front.
Snell, who says she is a Muslim, then fled from Syria only to be arrested again, this time by Turkish security forces in the southern Hatay province. US consular officials visited her in prison on 26 August.
She is from Daytona, Florida, but has had a residency permit in Istanbul for the past 18 months where she rents an apartment, according to her husband, Suliman Wardak.
He told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) he was detained for two days after security forces searched his wife’s apartment on 22 August and confiscated her computer, video camera and other electronic equipment.
The CPJ has demanded that the Turkish authorities release Snell. Its Europe and central Asia programme coordinator, Nina Ognianova, also said: “We call on the government to end its harassment of reporters crossing the border from Syria.”
Sources: BBC/Facebook/Associated Press/CPJ
