State Security Service

Abuja, Nigeria, December 26, 2012--Nigerian authorities must immediately release two journalists who have been detained since Monday and allow a third journalist who has fled into hiding to return to his home and work freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

In pre-dawn raids on Monday, about 40 armed security agents arrested Aliyu Saleh, a reporter with Al-Mizan, a weekly Hausa-language newspaper, and Musa Muhammad Awwal, the paper's editor, at their homes in Rigasa in the northern state of Kaduna, according to news reports. The agents also confiscated the journalists' phones and money and briefly detained the journalists' wives, news reports said.

Armed men in plainclothes raided the offices of CNN in the commercial capital of Lagos on January 16, 2012, amid nationwide protests over hikes in fuel prices, according to local journalists and news reports.