SWITZERLAND: Journalists acquitted

 UPDATE 
APRIL 17, 2007

Original alert January 10, 2006

Sandro Brontz, SonntagsBlick
Beat Jost, SonntagsBlick
Christoph Grenacher, SonntagsBlick
LEGAL ACTION

A Swiss military tribunal in St. Gallen acquitted the journalists of all charges, ruling they had not broken the law by publishing the material, according to international press reports.

Swiss prosecutors had charged Christoph Grenacher, editor-in-chief of the Zurich-based weekly SonntagsBlick, and two reporters, Sandro Brotz and Beat Jost, with publishing classified intelligence about purported CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. The weekly had published the contents of a fax from Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit to the Egyptian Embassy in London. The fax alleged the existence of a CIA prison in Romania and suggested there were other such prisons in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Ukraine.