Havana, Cuba.- The independent journalist Osniel Carmona Breijo, a CubaNet collaborator, was arrested this afternoon at the headquarters of the Havana International Book Fair. It is unknown where he is being held.
Carmona was at the event doing interviews on the last day of the fair with another journalist, Alejandro Hernández Cepero, who was able to escape from the police and contact this outlet.
Cepero narrates that while they were filming in the tents they noticed that a policeman was near them, but he appeared to be just another customer and not on duty or paying particular attention to the reporters. He even asked the price of some books, so they didn’t care, and went on with his work.
Right at the end of the third interview, a person in civilian clothes approaches and asks Osniel where he was from. “The last thing I heard was ‵ I’m from CubaNet ′“, points out Hernández, who at that moment returned a call to his daughter, so he details that the arrest occurred at 4:05 in the afternoon.
A few meters away from Osniel, Alejandro witnessed how he was led by a non-uniformed individual who was never identified, but who led four officers of the National Revolutionary Police.
“I immediately noticed that other police officers were looking for me, so I walked between different stands in the hope of being able to mislead them and leave the premises to be able to report what had happened,” says the journalist who managed to take advantage of the tumult to escape.
At the time of writing this note, more than four hours have passed in detention and, although Carmona Breijo’s cell phone remains active, he does not answer calls or messages. His whereabouts are unknown and he is incommunicado, so it can be declared that he is in “forced disappearance.”
At the end of April last year, the reporter was arrested on the outskirts of La Mariposa Children’s Park, belonging to the Parque Lenin complex in the Arroyo Naranjo municipality, where he took images for a journalistic job.
At that time, Carmona Breijo was transferred to the Ninth Unit of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR), in San Miguel del Padrón, where he remained for approximately 18 hours locked in a room of barely two square meters, without light or ventilation.
“The feeling of claustrophobia and suffocation was enormous, I even felt relief when the State Security (SE) officers entered. I thought that after the interrogation and the threats, they would surely put me in a common cell, and hopefully they would release me that same day,” the journalist explained, adding that this is the second time he has been taken to the same PNR unit. .
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