LONDON: The Committee to Protect Journalists has urged the Houthis to free a journalist they abducted in August and to end their “campaign against journalists.”

Youness Abdelsalam was seized in Sanaa and the CPJ said it feared he could be executed for his reporting.

His family said he had not been formally charged with a crime.

Abdelsalam, who worked for local papers, criticized the Houthis and also the Yemeni government.

“The Houthis must release Youness Abdelsalam immediately and stop abducting journalists,” said the CPJ’s senior Middle East and North Africa researcher Justin Shilad. “The Houthis’ campaign against journalists knows no bounds, and now more than ever the international community needs to take action.”

The CPJ said Abdelsalam suffered from health issues and that his family had only been able to visit him once since his arrest.

He is being held with at least four other journalists, all of whom face the death sentence, the CPJ said, adding that the Iran-backed militia had “assaulted, imprisoned, and forced out journalists from areas under the group’s control over the last several years.”

Imprisoned journalists experienced torture, isolation, and the deprivation of critical healthcare services while in detention, their familes warned.

They said the brother of Abdulkader Al-Murtada, who is the head of the Houthi prisoner affairs committee, tortured the journalists himself or incited other captors to mistreat them. They also said they had been forced to bribe Houthis to deliver life-saving injections to one diabetic journalist.

“We bribe the Houthis to allow us to send him an injection every 20 days. We do not know if he received them or not,” a family member said.

The Houthis have committed human rights and other abuses since they took power from the internationally recognized Yemeni government in 2014. 

Since then, and with the assistance of Iranian weapons and training, they have executed a bloody campaign in order to control the whole country.