Alfred Egbegi was arrested by the Police in Yenogoa, the Bayelsa State capital in the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria .Egbegi was arrested at about 12.45 Hours GMT by policemen from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) who trailed him to an office on Emmanuel Otitio Road in Yenogoa with the assistance of his printer, Olatubosun Isaac, who was arrested an hour earlier and forced to reveal the publishers whereabouts.

Issac was arrested at about 12 noon, along with Esther Bekeowei, a secretary in the newspaper’s office on Azikoro Road in Yenogoa. Isaac and Bekeowei were both taken to the state CID office where they were detained. Egbegi was arrested by five police officers led by an assistant superintendent of police, Alex Akhigbe.

He was driven away in a grey Peugeot 504 salon car with registration number NPF 4667 B. The publisher, who had been on the run since 10 April, reportedly shouted while being arrested that Charles Tambou, the press secretary to the deputy governor of the state, should be held responsible for his arrest.He said: “He (Tambou) has been threatening to cripple my business.

I stand by my story. Let him either refute it or go to court. They have planned to arrest more journalists.”The State Police Commissioner, Hafiz Ringim confirmed on April 12 that Egbegi was arrested “based on a petition from the State government”, adding that after investigations, he might be charged to court. Egbegi was released on bail in the evening of 12 April, hours after his arrest and detention, but was charged by the Police before a Magistrate’s Court in Yenogoa the next day, 13 April, on eight counts of conducting himself in a manner likely to cause a breach of the peace in “Charge Number YMC/163/C/2006: Commissioner of Police versus Alfred Egbebi.”

Further hearing in the trial was been postponed to 20 April 2006.Tambou said in a statement issued in Yenagoa on April 13 that “The era when the press is treated with kid gloves is over, as the law will be made to take its course.”Following the publication of a story about Egbegi’s arrest in the privately-owned national newspaper, The Punch on 12 April, the deputy governor is alleged to have threatened to beat up the newspaper’s correspondent in the state, Bisi Olaniyi.Olaniyi said the deputy governor shouted at him: “Look, I don’t care. I will beat you up. I don’t have time to report you to anybody. I will handle the case myself and thoroughly deal with you.”

But Tambou has denied that the deputy governor made any such threat, saying the deputy governor “only talked to him (the correspondent) verbally. “Accusing The Punch correspondent of not reporting the event objectively, Tambou said: “If any journalist behaves irresponsibly, we go to court. That is why we have taken that journalist to court.” The press secretary also denied that there was any rift between the governor and his deputy, alleging that Olaniyi and Egbegi were sponsored by a political opponent in the state to cause trouble between Jonathan and his deputy.

Alfred Egbegi, publisher of a privately-owned weekly newspaper Izon Link based in Yenogoa, theBayelsaState capital in the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria, expressed fear that his life may be in danger as officials of the state government and security operatives were trailing him over a story published in the April 10 edition of the newspaper.

The story, published in the Volume 7, Number 8 edition of the newspaper, carried the headline “Ebebi cries out: Jonathan is stabbing me”. The story alleged political intrigues between the state governor and his deputy over who would contest the forth coming 2007 general elections to govern the State.Egbegi said since April 10, 2006, when the newspaper hit the newsstands, he had been receiving anonymous phone calls threatening to deal with him for embarrassing the governor and his deputy.

He added that other journalists critical of the government of the state were also being targeted by agents of the state government and that some of them had been marked for arrest. However, Charles Tambou, the press secretary to the deputy governor, in a telephone interview, denied that the government was planning to arrest Egbegi, saying it was normal for people to express displeasure over negative newspaper publications but that such displeasure did not warrant harassing, arresting or intimidating journalists. But Egbegi said he reported the threats to the Nigerian Police and the State Security Service (SSS)Nigeria’s intelligence service.

Attah Ikharo and Jerry Adamu, two journalists of a privately-owned television station, Degue Broadcast Network (DBN), were beaten up by policemen led by the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) in charge of the Garki Police Station in Abuja, Femi Ogedengbe.

The incident took place while Ikharo and Adamu were covering protests embarked upon by temporary staff hired by the National Population Commission in Abuja over the non-payment of their allowance for the national housing and population census exercise held in Nigeria in March 2006.Narrating their ordeal, Ikharo said the DPO led his men to the venue of the payment exercise ostensibly to maintain peace and order because the enumerators were becoming restive over the delay in the payment of their allowances. According to him, “The DPO himself threw a teargas canister to the crowd even though the crowd didn’t provoke the police with any untoward attitude. However, the teargas caused a pandemonium and confusion. Everybody was surprised because the situation had not degenerated to the level of releasing teargas on the people.”

In the confusion that followed, the policemen were reported to have attacked the journalists. Ikharo said: “At this point, the DPO held me by the neck and spat on my face while the others (policemen) attended to my colleague in the same proportion. The two of us sustained injuries with my colleague’s forehead gushing with blood. “The incident was later reported to the Inspector General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, and the Commissioner of Police for the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Lawrence Alobi, who was reported to have queried the DPO and reprimanded him for his conduct. Ikharo said the DPO was ordered by the Police Commissioner to apologise to the journalists and pay their medical bills. But he said although Ogedengbe tendered a verbal apology, “we have not seen the man to either ask us how we are doing or to see us while we were being treated at the hospital.”

The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Nigeria’s regulatory agency for the broadcast sector, imposed sanctions on a privately-owned radio station, Freedom Radio, for allegedly violating its Code.

The NBC banned the station, based in Kano in North West Nigeria, from broadcasting between 17 and 22 hours daily. In addition, Freedom Radio was ordered to pay the sum of N200,000 (about US$1,600) within 48 hours.The station was also banned from broadcasting any political programme, even after the present restriction on its broadcasting period is rescinded. In addition, the station was asked to stop airing specific programmes including: “Special programme”; “Kowa ya tuna bara”; “Kowane Gauta”; and “Kowane Tsuntsu”.

The NBC, in a letter dated March 27 ,2006, signed by its Director General, Dr. Silas Babajiya Yisa, and addressed to the General Manager of the station, accused it of not complying with political broadcast regulations of the NBC Code as well as violating regulations on talk show programming.The NBC alleged that its monitoring reports of the station’s political and talk-show programmes “indicated that the maturity required of such programmes was still lacking with guests and callers making unguarded comments that violate provisions of the NBC Code always tending to overheat the polity.

“The Commission claimed that its action was informed by the inability of the anchor persons on the station to handle the banned programmes professionally over time, from 2005 to date.But the station denied the charges, saying the NBC’s action was intended to stifle dissenting opinions in the country. Mouktar Mohammed, a retired officer in the Nigerian Air Force and chairman of the board of directors of the station, said the NBC’s action was a political vendetta as the Commission did not give the station a fair hearing as required by the Nigerian Broadcasting Code before taking the decision to ban some of its political programmes as well as the other sanctions.He said Freedom Radio does not broadcast programmes capable of jeopardizing peace in the country, observing that the action of the NBC was a deliberate attempt to deprive the country of an a free and independent source of information under a supposedly democratic country. Freedom Radio was licensed in 2002 and commenced operation on December 1, 2003. It is owned by Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu, a member of the opposition political party the Advanced Congress of Democrats (ACD).

The station broadcasts in ten languages, including major Nigerian languages such as Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Kanuri, Ebira, Fufulde, Igala in addition to English, French and Arabic. Its signals are received in the northern Nigerian states of Kano , Jigawa, Katsina, Kaduna , Plateau and Bauchi.The NBC lifted the restrictions after about two weeks after their imposition.Farouk Dalhatu, executive director of the station disclosed that the station received a letter from the NBC asking it to resume normal broadcasting operations. Dalhatu added that though the station did not pay the N200,000 fine imposed on it by the NBC, it was calculating the losses it incurred as a result of the restrictions

Emmanuel Ugwu, a correspondent for “ThisDay” newspaper in Enugu State in South eastern Nigeria petitioned the Nigerian Police over alleged death threats following a story he wrote for his newspaper about an assault on census enumerators in the 2006 housing and population census in Nigeria .

In a petition to the Enugu State Commissioner of Police, Ugwu said following a story he wrote about a violent attack on census enumerators in the town of Amankanu in the state, he started receiving phone calls threatening to trace him and kill him if he did not retract the story.He said a man who simply identified himself as Alex called him at about 9.18 pm on March 24, 2006, accusing him of being hired to write news stories tarnishing the image of Amankanu and giving him two days within which to retract the story he wrote.

Ugwu said the man threatened that if by 26 March 2006, he failed to write a retraction, he would be fished out and killed. Between March 21 and 27, 2006,Nigeriacarried out a National Population and Housing Census.