Two months after Moussa Kaka vanished in Niamey, Niger still won’t say where the journalist is held

DAKAR — Niger’s military authorities should say where the journalist Moussa Kaka is being held and release him unless he has been charged with a valid offence, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, two months after he disappeared in Niamey.

Kaka, the director-general of Radio Télévision Saraounia, left his office on 31 August to drive home and never arrived. For weeks his family and colleagues could get no information. On 25 September, during Niger’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN in Geneva, Justice Minister Alio Daouda acknowledged that Kaka was being held for an alleged “offense” and would “answer before the courts”. He gave no details of the accusation or the place of detention.

“Two months after Moussa Kaka vanished in Niger, the authorities have yet to provide his location or explain his detention,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at HRW. The group also quoted the Senegalese rights defender Alioune Tine, a former UN expert: “Moussa Kaka’s place is not in detention.”

Days after a failed mutiny

Kaka disappeared two days after an attempted military coup in Niamey on 29 August. HRW says the junta then arrested dozens of suspected soldiers and a former minister, and that Russian government-controlled Africa Corps forces were called in to help put down the mutiny. Colleagues fear his disappearance is linked to that crackdown.

Reporters Without Borders says Daouda confirmed to it on 6 October that Kaka “is alive”, but that the authorities have still given no information on his condition, place of detention or the legal grounds for holding him. RSF regards him as a victim of enforced disappearance under the UN convention Niger has ratified. After RSF’s appeal, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances asked Niger to clarify his fate and whereabouts. The organisation had earlier raised the case with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ special rapporteur on freedom of expression.

Not his first detention

Kaka reported for Radio France Internationale for years until the junta suspended RFI in 2023. In 2007, under President Mamadou Tandja, he spent 379 days in prison after being accused of links to Tuareg rebels he had covered. In October 2025 he was one of six journalists arrested in Niamey and charged under the cybercrime law after announcing a press briefing about a government-created fund for the security forces; all six were later released, HRW says.

The case adds to a pattern documented by rights groups since the 2023 coup: dissolved political parties, suspended civil-society groups, journalists prosecuted under the cybercrime law and former president Mohamed Bazoum still detained. This week, HRW and Amnesty also marked a year without prosecutions for the killings in Tanzania’s election crackdown, and a Cairo court has ordered the independent outlet Mada Masr closed.

Sources: Human Rights Watch, 28 Oct 2026; Reporters Without Borders, 6 Oct 2026; allAfrica, 29 Oct 2026.

— AB24 · Dakar