kidnappers told me not to talk to media, released jounalist says

By Nasser Arrabyee/12/07/2010

The Yemeni journalist Abdul Elah Haidar Shea was released Monday about 10 hours after security men kidnapped him from a Sana’a street because of his media statements about Al Qaeda.
Shea said the gunmen who kidnapped him from Hadda street in the evening of July 11th, 2010 , identified themselves to him as security people.

“They told me the statements I give to the media are damaging the interests of the homeland,” Shea told Gulf News immediately after he was released.

They took him blind-folded to a place where they interrogated him for more than six hours .

“I think the place was the Political Security or National Security offices, and they asked how I met Al Qaeda people and where I get the my information from,” Said Shea who previously made exclusive interviews with the two top leaders of Al Qaeda Nasser Al Wahayshi and Anwar Al Awlaki.

The journalist Shea said that the security people told him to be careful about the ‘Red Lines’.

“ ‘We hope you now understood the message, and the red lines’ they told me before I was released,” he said.

“My lab top is still with them.”
Shea said he was not subjected to torture while being investigated. But he said one of the investigators hit him on his nose when tried to pray when they arrived the place of investigation.

The journalist Shea did not exclude that his kidnapping had something to do with the internet statement of Sunday July 11th, 2010, in which the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility for the attack on the intelligence headquarters in June 19th, 2010, in which 11 people were killed.