Via Reuters:

A Somali radio station closed by Islamists for playing local love songs deemed to encourage immorality returned to the airwaves on Monday after pledging to stop broadcasting music.

“We’ve been on air since midday,” Said Haga Afrah, director of Radio Jowhar, told Reuters. “We are powerless so we have to heed their call to stop playing music on air.”

Islamist leaders who control Jowhar, an agricultural town 56 miles north of Mogadishu, ordered the station closed on Saturday in the latest show of hardline religious tendencies in the movement which has taken over a swathe of southern Somalia.

Local Islamist leader, Sheikh Mohamed Mahamud Abdirahman, went alone to the station to convey the message on Saturday.

“He said the music encourages immorality, we had no option but to close down,” Afrah said, adding that the station would have to adjust its programs to fill the time.

In addition, an independent and outspoken journalist at the radio station was detained for 48 hours:

RSF (Reporters Without Borders) in a statement today condemned the “punitive measures taken by Somalia’s Islamic courts against the press” in the past few days. “Radio Jowhar’s attempts to maintain an independent editorial line in the terrible climate prevailing in Somalia deserve to be rewarded with respect, not with arbitrary closure. Similarly, journalists should not have to live in fear of being arrested by militiamen just because the facts they have reported have upset someone in authority,” RSF added.

Meanwhile, a militia that supports the Islamic courts arrested Mr Areys, a local correspondent for privately-owned ‘Radio Simba’ and other Mogadishu-based stations, on 8 September in Beledweyn, the capital of the central region of Hiiraan, while he was covering a demonstration after Friday evening prayers in protest against any deployment of peacekeepers in Somalia.

Beledweyn-based journalists quoted by NUSOJ said Mr Areys was arrested because of a radio report in which members of the city’s population complained about the restrictions being imposed by the Islamic courts. He was released yesterday without any charges being pressed, according to RSF.

CPJ has more.

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