A Somali woman who said she was raped by state security forces, and a journalist who interviewed her, were each sentenced to a year in jail yesterday in a trial described by human rights advocates as “a terrible miscarriage of justice”.
The 27-year-old woman was accused of insulting a government body and making false claims. The court in the capital, Mogadishu, said it based its decision on medical evidence that she was not raped, but the judge deferred her sentence until she has weaned her infant child. The reporter Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim was also given a jail sentence of one year. He interviewed the woman in early January but never filed a story.