Detained US professor to appear before new prosecutor

Professor Patrice Nganang, of Stony Brook University, New York, who has been detained in Cameroon for a week, has been transferred to another facility and was scheduled to appear before a new prosecutor, his supporters said in a news release, writes Zachary R Dowdy for Newsday.

The development comes two days after legal authorities dropped a charge that Nganang (47), an outspoken cultural studies and comparative literature professor, had insulted Cameroon’s President Paul Biya with writings published and posted just before he was arrested on 6 December while boarding a flight from Cameroon to meet his wife in Zimbabwe. However, supporters said Nganang remains charged with issuing a death threat against Biya.

By last Wednesday, an open letter generated at Princeton University in the US, written to “condemn in the strongest possible terms the illegal detention of our colleague and friend, the esteemed Cameroonian-American scholar and writer Professor Patrice Nganang”, had garnered more than 600 signatures from academics and activists worldwide. It also contained signatures of more than 100 Stony Brook University professors and students.
Full report on the Newsday site