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-Mr. Ahmed Badi Mohamed Salem was born in 1980 in the Sahrawi refugee camps.
His mother is Lala Bebeeh Ahmadi. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature
from Jijel University in eastern Algeria.
-Mr. Yahya Mohamed Salem Embarek Al-Hissane was born in 1979 in the Sahrawi
refugee camps. His mother is Ahdidihim Lamine Mohamed. He completed the
second year of high school.
Both men were employed by the Sahrawi Ministry of Information, where Mr. Ahmed
worked for about nine months until mid-2007 in the National Television Project. As
for Mr. Yahya, he joined the Provincial Radio Network of Aouserd in 1999, and in
2000 joined the National Radio Network. In 2006 he worked three months in the
National Television Project.
According to the information available to us, Mr. Ahmed Badi was dismissed for
professional reasons, but he claims that it was arbitrary. As for Mr. Yahya Mohamed
Salem, according to the same information, he left the organization by his own choice.
Presently, Mr. Ahmed Badi works with the organization Landmine Action, a nongovernmental
organization based in Britain that works for the removal of land mines
from the liberated lands of the Saharan Republic. Mr. Yahya Mohamed Salem works
as an official in the department of information at the General Union of Labor of es-
Saguia el-Hamra and Oued edh-Dhahab (the labor union that is part of Sahrawi civil
society). Contrary to the mentioned allegations, their departure from the Ministry of
Information was not a measure taken in response to their criticism of the Polisario in
articles published in the newspaper El-Mustaqbal es-Sahrawi (The Sahrawi Future).
Moreover, the current director and the founder of El-Mustaqbal es-Sahrawi, Mr. Saïd
Zarwal, in tandem with his work at the newspaper, works also at Free Sahara, the
official newspaper of the Ministry of Information.
Regarding what you raised regarding the so-called Khat ech-Chahid and the
allegations raised by Mahjoub Salek, we inform you of the following:
195 Human Rights Watch December 2008