Saturday, April 27, 2013

Honduras: Director of Honduran free expression NGO warned of plot against him

IFEX

Comité por la Libre Expresión - C-Libre

The Committee for Free Expression (Comité por la Libre Expresión, C-Libre) reports that its executive director, Héctor Longino Becerra, received death threats on Saturday 20 April 2013, by phone, which were received at approximately 9:42 p.m. The caller told Becerra that there was a plan to have him killed.

Becerra received three phone calls. In the first he could not understand what the caller was saying and he hung up, assuming it was a wrong number. The same thing happened a second time. Because of the caller's persistence, when Becerra received a third call, he decided to record the conversation.

According to the journalist, when the phone rang he heard a woman's voice in the background and a man's voice saying: "I plan to kill you, your mother, your father, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your friends, and your friends' friends. If they are dead I will bring them back to life and kill them again."

On 22 April, Becerra made a formal report of the incident to the Honduran Committee for the Families of the Detained and the Disappeared (COFADEH) and to the Secretariat for Justice and Human Rights. On 23 April he informed Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, who has recently visited Honduras.

Hacking and phone tapping

C-Libre has been warned by people with expertise in criminal investigations that mobile phones belonging to a team of journalists from conexihon.info, an online daily affiliated with C-Libre, may have been tapped. One conexihon.info reporter also reported their email account had been hacked. Calls from unknown mobile phones have also been received by C-Libre.

Currently, conexihon.info, an alternative media outlet, investigates cases of corruption, agricultural and mining conflict and the situation of journalists in Honduras, among other topics.

(Please note this is an abridged translation.)