Chad's largest online news website suspended

N'Djamena, Chad — Access to Chad's largest online news platform has been suspended since Friday, an organization for Chadian online media reported on Sunday.

The group said the website for Tchadinfos.com, the leading news organization in the Sahel country, had been taken offline after it refused to comply with a request from former adviser to the Chadian President Abakar Manany.

"A few weeks ago, M. Manany demanded via his lawyers that Tchadinfos remove all articles written about him -- we refused to take them down because these are factual articles," the website's general manager Mamadou Djimtebaye told AFP.

"He then reached out to our U.S.-based host via his lawyers in South Africa to suspend us," Djimtebaye added.

The Organization for Online Media in Chad in a statement denounced "serious attacks on press freedom and the freedom to inform," asking that an independent probe be launched into Manany and his "potential accomplices." 

Manany did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

Tchadinfos runs a website as well as a radio station and a television channel in Chad, one of the poorest nations in the world.