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Refugee journalists recount horrors of working in Somalia

After confirming he couldn’t see anything, they took him to a different room.

“They were whispering saying something like one bullet in the head and four on the chest. I thought that was my last day alive. Then I was waiting for when the bullets would hit me.”

But they didn’t. He instead received blows and kicks from different directions.

All this was to push him to say who had peeped through the window.

Later on, one of the captors advised him to admit and ask for forgiveness.

“I didn’t know I would be out of there when I am alive. I was thinking that every single second that I am going to be dead. Because every time they were pretending they were going to kill us,” he explained.

But after six months he was released while the rest of his colleagues were released nine months after.

In 2009 March, he found his way to Nairobi and since then, he says returning back to Somalia will be inviting his own death.

“Sometimes we want to go back to our country but nothing much has changed. If I try to go back they will say I am a spy. I believe they will slaughter me suddenly that’s why I will stay in Kenya.”

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Since then Mohammed abandoned his job as a journalist and now lives in Kenya without a job and his family.
Amal Yusuf, a 24 year old lady worked as a radio manager in Mogadishu. Like Mohammed, to be a journalist in Somalia is like anathema.

“I was always threatened by people. When you are a journalist every time you go out, you don’t know if you will return home alive.”

She was pulled out of a passenger vehicle after Al Shabaab members recognised she was a journalist.

“They tortured me. They kept me in a very dark and hot room. Sometimes they said they would kill me. They asked me why I was committing a crime. Why I was working as a journalist and the religion does not allow women to work as journalists. They told me if I continued they would kill me in front of the public.”

After news spread that she was in captivity, Somali elders negotiated with the captors and she was released after eight days.

Yusuf lives in Kenya away from her husband and two children.

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