Syria confirms Canadian journalist detained: Al-Jazeera

MAY 5, 2011

Syrian authorities confirmed they are holding a Canadian Al-Jazeera journalist who has been missing since Friday, the news organization said Wednesday.

The authorities also said Dorothy Parvaz, a University of British Columbia graduate, is being treated well.

“Basically, they don’t like journalists,” her father, Fred Parvaz, a professor at Capilano University in Vancouver, said Wednesday.

“There are no charges we are aware of,” he said. “She was in the airport when she was detained.”

Dorothy Parvaz was sent on assignment from Doha, Qatar, to cover the recent protests in Damascus. But no one at Al-Jazeera or in her family heard a word from the 39-yearold journalist either immediately or in the hours and days after her flight landed.

The passenger manifest indicated she got off the plane, but her employers said she never made it to her hotel.

For six days, Parvaz’s father, fiancé and coworkers had pleaded for Syrian officials to confirm her whereabouts and well-being. Their pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears until Wednesday, when officials informed Al-Jazeera they had its reporter.

The Syrian government has been clamping down violently on protesting dissidents and members of the media as demonstrations become widespread.

Parvaz was born in Iran and lived there with her grandmother throughout the 1979 Iranian revolution.

After reuniting with her family in the United Arab Emirates, she moved to Vancouver with her family when she was 12.

James Weldon of the North Shore News

 

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