Algiers (AFP)

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune accused Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which launched an international campaign of solidarity in favor of his imprisoned correspondent Khaled Drareni, of wanting to "destabilize" Algeria.

Algeria is "targeted" by NGOs which are trying to "undermine the stability of the country," Tebboune said Sunday evening during a meeting with two representatives of the Algerian print media.

"The States are not attacking us head-on but entrusting non-governmental organizations with this mission", he accused, asked about the fate of journalist Khaled Drareni, founder of the online news site Casbah Tribune, correspondent in Algeria for the French television channel TV5 Monde and RSF.

By targeting Robert Ménard, former secretary general of RSF who left the NGO since 2008, Mr. Tebboune said that if RSF had "respectable journalists", it was however "inadmissible to name a colonist's son who tries every time to give lessons to Algerians, hence the importance of investigating the founders of these organizations as well as the modalities of their financing ".

Mr. Ménard is now mayor of Béziers, France, supported by the National Rally.

The Algerian president also assured that "no person is imprisoned (in Algeria) for an article that he wrote".

"We prohibit insults and attacks on matters relating to state security," he nevertheless qualified.

According to Mr. Tebboune, Khaled Drareni - whose name he never mentioned during the interview - was sentenced because he is "involved in a case having no relation to the press", without further clarification .

Detained since March 29, Khaled Drareni was arrested after covering a student demonstration in Algiers on March 7, as part of the "Hirak", a peaceful protest movement born in February 2019 demanding a profound change in the "system" in place since independence in 1962.

He is also accused of having criticized on Facebook "the corruption and money" of the political system, according to RSF.

The Minister of Communication Ammar Belhimer accuses the journalist of having worked without a professional press card, and of being in the pay of "foreign embassies".

"His continued detention is proof of the regime's confinement in a logic of absurd, unjust and violent repression," denounced the secretary general of RSF, Christophe Deloire, after the journalist's conviction on appeal.

Algeria is in 146th place (out of 180) in RSF's 2020 World Press Freedom Index.

© 2020 AFP