Somalia Holds Woman Activist Without Charge After Prison Interview

Sadia Moalim Ali remains in Mogadishu central prison more than three weeks after her arrest for anti-government activism on social media. The 27-year-old nursing graduate who works as a rickshaw driver has not been formally charged. She was arrested on 12 April, transferred to the prison on 14 April and continues to be held.

While in initial police detention Ali was pressed into signing a document she did not understand before being taken to court. According to Amnesty International the police received court permission to hold her for 90 days pending further investigation. She has been denied access to a lawyer appointed for her.

In an interview from prison aired on Shabelle Media on 20 April, Ali said she was being held without due legal process and appealed for her freedom. The Guardian reported that she was then tortured the same day by two male guards who stripped her naked in a room monitored by CCTV. She was kicked, beaten with a baton and left for two days in a small cell without food.

“I was tortured. I was forced to lie face down on the ground, and water was poured on me. I was kicked by guards with boots on. They stood over me and beat me with a baton. I was taken into solitary confinement and kept there for two days.

I was deprived of food and basic necessities while I was locked in that cell,” Ali said from prison. She attributed the punishment directly to the media interview. “Before when I spoke to the media, I was punished the same day,” she stated.

The room is known as cellula della morte, or cell of death. The prison was built during Italian rule, which ended in 1941. Former prisoners say the cellula della morte is reserved to punish people and for those facing execution.

The Guardian reported its floor is doused in engine oil and salt and covered in faeces. The cell measures about two square metres. Ali, the main breadwinner for her extended family including her 11-month-old daughter, now shares another cell with 38 other women.

“It is a very difficult life. No human being deserves to be put in here. It is a place with no ventilation. Even a healthy person gets sick,” she said. She has since developed kidney problems as well as numbness in her hand and foot.

Ali said she would end her activism and just wanted to go home to her family. The Guardian reported she used Facebook and TikTok to criticise the federal government, speaking out against alleged corruption and nepotism, forced evictions, youth unemployment, taxation and high fuel prices.

Dalmar Dhayow of the Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders said sexual assault or violence is systematically used as a tool to force women to make false confessions, humiliate and harass them inside prison.

Human rights organisations, former government officials and a Somali MP have said Ali’s detention is unlawful and called for her immediate release. Abdirahman Abdishakur, leader of an opposition party, posted on X that Ali’s detention was “a national disgrace and a damning indictment of President Hassan Sheikh’s administration”.

Since 2022 Somali authorities have been accused of engaging in a systematic and escalating crackdown on human rights using arbitrary arrests, detention, harassment, threats and intimidation to silence journalists, activists and other people who express dissenting views, The Guardian reported.