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Swiss NGO Alkarama Executive Director arrested at Paris-Orly

GENEVA, Jan 18 (KUNA) -- The Swiss Human rights NGO (Alkarama) has sent on Wednesday appeals to the UN human rights special procedures condemning the arbitrary nature of its Executive Director Dr Mourad Dhina's arrest on Monday at Paris-Orly airport.
"French police arrested Dr.Mourad Dhina at the request of the Algerian authorities as he was in Paris attending a board meeting of Rachad, an Algerian political opposition movement, of which Dhina is a founding member," said Alkarama in a press release.
Rachad seeks the peaceful establishment of good governance in Algeria.
Dhina is set to meet the Paris Attorney-General on Tuesday to hear the official request by the Algerian authorities for his extradition.
"Dr Mourad Dhina's arrest, at the request of the Algerian authorities, is of purely political nature," said Rachid Mesli, Alkarama's Legal Director "and his extradition would constitute a serious violation by the French authorities of the Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights." Father of six and a resident in Switzerland, Dhina earned his PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1980s. He is a former professor of physics at Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETHZ and worked as a theoretical physicist at the European organization for nuclear research CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. (end) ta.ma KUNA 181114 Jan 12NNNN