At Least 17 People Including 2 Foreign Journalists Arrested, Weapons Recovered In Burundi’s Late Night Police Raids

Highlights:

At least 17 people were arrested among them two foreign journalists in a late night police raid in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital.

According to presidential spokesman, the people were arrested in Jabe and Nyakabiga with an assortment of weapons recovered.

Summary:

Burundi’s Presidential spokesman announced through state television station that on 28^th January, at least 17 people were arrested in Bujumbura and an assortment of weapons recovered in an overnight police raid.

Among the arrested were two foreign journalists; Jean Philippe Remy –the Africa bureau chief for the Le Monde newspaper and Phil Moore- a British freelance journalist that is a regular Al Jazeera English contributor.

Moore has been mention the raids and criticizing the unnecessarily regular raids on civilians and suspected rebel members in his official twitters account before he was arrested.

According to human rights activists in Burundi, the government has been a conducting major crackdown on the opposition parties, human rights activists as well as the media with most of the local journalist in the country taking asylum.

Since the violence broke out in April 2015, at least 300 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled Burundi to the neighboring countries like Rwanda and Tanzania.