{"id":2397,"date":"2019-11-27T06:55:08","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T06:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.caps.af\/?p=2397"},"modified":"2019-11-27T06:56:14","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T06:56:14","slug":"us-ambassador-bass-condemns-arrest-of-logar-activists-by-nds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caps.af\/?p=2397","title":{"rendered":"US Ambassador Bass Condemns Arrest of Logar Activists by NDS"},"content":{"rendered":"

(TOLO news): The US Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass, followed by envoys from other nations including Germany and the Netherlands, on Tuesday night strongly reacted to the arrest of Afghan activists who exposed reports of alleged sexual abuse of children and youth in multiple schools in Logar province.<\/strong>
\nTheir reactions came minutes after President Ashraf Ghani stated he \u201cdisagrees with the intelligence agencies\u2019 approach and instructed the NDS to immediately hand over the protection of the activists to the Ministry of Interior Affairs.\u201d \u201cWhen I was briefed today (Tuesday) about the development on the case I immediately instructed NDS to stop the proceedings. The protection of civil society and human rights defenders is the sole responsibility of the security forces,\u201d Ghani said. Also on Tuesday night, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah\u2019s office in a statement condemned the arrest of Afghan activists for exposing reports on Logar sex abuse allegations and said the issue will be closely followed with security agencies to prevent the repeat of such detention. The two men detained by the National Directorate of Security (NDS) are civil society members from Logar who exposed allegations of mass sexual abuse of children and youth in Logar province, and whose findings were further reported on by the UK\u2019s Guardian and other international and Afghan news agencies. The Guardian article, which was published on November 13, quoted Musa Mahmoudi, head of Logar\u2019s civil society, and reported that \u201cover 500\u201d children and youth had been sexually abused in \u201csix schools\u201d in Logar. Mahmoudi and fellow civil society member Ehsanullah Hamidind were later taken into custody by the National Directorate Service (NDS), a move that was condemned by Amnesty International and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Former president Hamid Karzai also spoke out against Mahmoudi\u2019s detainment. On Tuesday, Amnesty International tweeted a screenshot of \u201clast messages\u201d received from Musa Mahmoudi \u201cbefore he was detained by NDS.\u201d The messages said \u201cNDS is trying to arrest me\u2026and blame me for everything.\u201d The NDS originally declined to confirm or deny reports that they held the activists, but on Tuesday the NDS stated that they had taken the activists into custody to \u201cprotect\u201d them from death threats, and the agency released a video of Musa Mahmoudi saying that his research on sex abuse (of students in Logar) was \u201cincomplete\u201d and \u201cincorrect\u201d and it was \u201cexaggerated\u201d by the media and he apologizes to the people for this. In response, US Ambassador John Bass tweeted that such \u201cSoviet-style\u201d tactics of coercing confessions was \u201cappalling.\u201d Bass, in a tweet said he \u201cfully supports\u201d the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission\u2019s view on \u201cthese forced detentions,\u201d referring to AIHRC\u2019s earlier calls for the release of the two Afghan activists. The Netherlands Embassy in Kabul in a tweet said the mission \u201cis very much concerned about the illegal detention of human rights defenders Mahmoudi and Hamidi. \u201cWe urge the immediate release of these human rights defenders from NDS detention,\u201d the embassy said. Peter Pr\u00fcgel, the German ambassador to Afghanistan, tweeted: \u201cSeriously concerned about the illegal detention of human rights defenders Mahmudi and Hamidi,” and “NDS’s interference in this case of alleged child abuse is unacceptable! Allegations of most serious human rights violations need to be thoroughly investigated, not silenced!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(TOLO news): The US Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass, followed by envoys from other nations including Germany and the Netherlands, on Tuesday night strongly reacted to the arrest of Afghan activists who exposed reports of alleged sexual abuse of children and youth in multiple schools in Logar province. Their reactions came minutes after President Ashraf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archived-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2397"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2400,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397\/revisions\/2400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caps.af\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}