The World - News from Jan. 15, 1988

A human rights committee of the National Academy of Sciences urged the president of Somalia to release 13 Somali scientists, engineers and physicians who it contends have been unjustly imprisoned for more than five years. In a report delivered to the Somali ambassador to the United States, the delegation called them “prisoners of conscience” and charged that most of them have been kept in continuous solitary confinement under unsanitary conditions, tortured and denied medical treatment. A spokesman for the Somali Embassy in Washington said the report was based on “hearsay” and “false assumptions.”