Journalist sent to prison on gay charges

A well-known Senegalese journalist will spend six months in jail after being found guilty of engaging in “homosexual acts”.

According to AP, Tamsir Jupiter Ndiaye was arrested in June after he was accused of attempted rape by a young man.

He was reportedly chased by an angry mob in the capital Dakar before seeking safety in a police station.

It’s not Ndiaye’s first run in with the law. In 2012, he was sentenced to four years in prison for “acts against nature”, illegal possession of a weapon and assault and battery following an altercation with a lover.

In 2013, Ndiaye – who was reported as being married at the time – was given a presidential pardon and released.

Same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Senegal under article 319 of the penal code which punishes “improper or unnatural” acts with jail time of between one and five years.

In 2013, Senegal’s minister of justice denied that article 319 targeted gays and lesbians, despite a number of arrests of LGBT people that followed.

In June 2014, Senegal’s President Macky Sall and American President Barack Obama famously exchanged words over the issue of LGBT rights during the US leader’s visit to the African country.

At a press conference in Dakar, President Sall told Obama: “Senegal, as far as it is concerned, is a very tolerant country which does not discriminate in terms of inalienable rights of the human being.”