Persvrijheid in Zuid-Soedan staat onder druk

South Sudan's police have detained a newspaper editor without charge and refused him access to a lawyer for three days, he told a Reuters reporter who visited him in a crowded police cell on Saturday.Rights groups frequently accuse security forces of harassing and illegally detaining journalists in South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan almost two years ago after more than two decades of civil war.

"They're holding me here illegally on the behalf of Alfred,"Michael Koma, managing editor at the Juba Monitor, said he was arrested on Thursday and was being held in lieu of the chief editor, Alfred Taban, who was in Kenya. Koma told Reuters from behind bars in his police cell in the capital Juba, which he shared with four other men.