By Abdoulaye Massalatchi

NIAMEY, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Authorities in Niger have detained the director of a private northern regional newspaper in a crackdown on media coverage of a Tuareg-led rebellion in the desert north, police said on Wednesday.

Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, director of the fortnightly Air Info newspaper published in the northern Agadez region of the West African state, was stopped late on Tuesday at Niamey international airport as he prepared to board a flight to Paris.

Police gave no immediate reasons for the detention or say what charges Diallo might face. But Niger's government has tried to restrict media coverage of the 8-month-old uprising by Tuareg and other light-skinned nomadic rebels in the north.

The rebels demand more economic development and a fairer share of the natural resources in a region which contains some of the world's largest reserves of uranium. The black-dominated government ruling from Niamey in the south dismisses them as common bandits and drug-traffickers.

Foreign journalists have been banned from travelling to the north, where the Tuareg-led rebel Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) has killed at least 45 government soldiers and taken dozens more captive in raids on military posts and mines.

Diallo's Air Info is the only newspaper published in Agadez and it had only reappeared again last month after a three-month ban by Niger's media regulators for "inciting violence".

Last month, a local journalist working for Radio France International, Moussa Kaka, was arrested on suspicion of having links to the rebels.

He is accused of endangering state security and receiving gifts for reports on the MNJ, but international media freedom watchdogs have called for his release.

Earlier this month, Niger authorities expelled a French documentary film-maker, also for suspected links to the Tuareg-led northern rebellion.

Amnesty International has accused Niger's security forces of arbitrarily arresting and torturing civilians under the state of alert in the Agadez region.

The government denied the charges as unfounded and accused the London-based human rights organisation of "disinformation" and "manipulation".

The MNJ uprising echoes more widespread rebellions in Niger and neighbouring Mali in the 1990s by desert nomads. The area remains awash with guns and armed banditry is common.

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