Niarchos travelled to the DRC to report on nature conservation, the financial system and tradition.
Kinhasa (Congo):
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s intelligence service has detained US journalist Stavros Nicolas Niarchos after he allegedly approached armed teams within the nation’s southeast, a senior authorities official stated Sunday.
Native civil-society teams corresponding to RECN quoted in native media stated that Niarchos and a Congolese journalist have been arrested within the southeastern metropolis of Lubumbashi on Wednesday and brought to the capital Kinshasa.
A senior authorities official who requested anonymity confirmed to AFP on Sunday that the Congolese intelligence company ANR is holding Niarchos in Kinshasa.
The 33-year-old journalist, who writes for US magazines The Nation and The New Yorker, had made contact with armed teams together with the Bakata Katanga militia, the official stated.
“He made actions that have been by no means beforehand reported to the authorities,” the official defined, noting that the federal government “should be vigilant” after the homicide of two United Nations specialists in 2017.
The UN had employed specialists American Michael Sharp and Swedish-Chilean Zaida Catalan to probe violence within the Kasai area of central DRC, the place they have been kidnapped and killed.
“The Congolese authorities have no real interest in holding an American journalist,” the senior authorities official stated, including that he could also be launched on Tuesday.
Niarchos travelled to the DRC to report on nature conservation, the financial system and tradition for The Nation journal, in response to the journalist’s official accreditation seen by AFP.
Neither The Nation nor the US embassy in Kinshasa have been instantly obtainable for remark.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)