A poster about the summons of journalist Mariam Majdouline Laham. (Photo taken from the journalist's Facebook page)
BEIRUT — Journalist Mariam Majdouline Laham has been summoned to appear on Wednesday morning before the Central Department of Criminal Investigations, she told L'Orient-Le Jour Tuesday, adding that she was unaware of the reason.
She said she believes the summons may be related to a tweet she posted on the social network X (formerly Twitter) in July, in which she accused the President of the Sunni Higher Court of Beirut, Judge Mohammad Ahmad Assaf, of personally benefiting from a case he was handling.
"The President of the Sunni Court of Beirut, Mohammad Assaf, is not free from suspicion in the case of the theft of Sunni endowment property," the journalist wrote on July 26. "I ask you the following question: how can you not recuse yourself from the case while you are directly benefiting from a 40 percent reduction in tuition fees for your children at the Beirut Arab University," she wrote, explicitly naming the judge.
Laham's is not the only recent case to target press freedom. At the end of March, Jean Kassir, co-founder of the media outlet Megaphone News, was summoned by State Security service and Lara Bitar, editor-in-chief of the investigative journalism media outlet The Public Source, was summoned by the Cybercrime Bureau. In July, Lebanese journalist and television personality Dima Sadek was sentenced to one year in prison, following a complaint filed against her three years ago by the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gebran Bassil, accusing her of defamation and slander.