2005-2014

According to RSF, on 7 July 1997, forty men stormed into the office of the "The Asian Age" in Bangalore, brutally stabbed two journalists and chopped off the thumb of a security guard. The mob then smashed and burned computers and office equipment. They were apparently angered by a news report about a poster in a West Bank town that depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammed as a pig. It was not clear...

On 27 June 1997, police assaulted Surinder Singh Oberoi, the correspondent for Agence France-Presse in Srinagar, as he and about twenty other local journalists had gathered in front of the United Nations Military Observers Group office in Srinagar. They intended to cover a demonstration by the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference which was protesting the authorities' refusal to allow them to hold a...

The 16 March 1997 slaying in Kashmir of Saidain Shafi, a contributor to programs carried on the official Indian television network Doordarshan, marks the second time in 1997 that a Kashmiri broadcast journalist has been killed and the eighth time that a journalist has been assassinated in Kashmir since an armed insurgency against Indian rule broke out in late 1989. On 16 March, two unidentified...

On 28 February 1997, senior journalists from Pakistan were detained for over three hours upon arriving at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi Airport. Among them were prominent journalists Mahmud Sham, editor of Pakistan's largest circulated daily "Jang", and Rehana Hakim (f), editor of the monthly "Newsline". According to Sham, for three hours, immigration authorities would not allow the journalists to...

Altaf Ahmed Faktoo, a news reader for the state-owned Doordarshan Kendra television station in Srinagar, Kashmir, was assassinated on 1 January 1997 by suspected militant separatists. Three unidentified men entered the Crown Hotel, owned by Faktoo's family, in Srinagar's heavily patrolled LalChowk area. They fired two shots at the journalist with a silencer pistol before fleeing the scene. No one...

On 25 October 1996, at least five journalists were assaulted after they and approximately seven other print and broadcast reporters had assembled in front of the residence of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Kanshi Ram to question him about his party's plans following hung assembly elections in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. After asking the journalists what they were doing there, an enraged...

On 1 August 1996, three unidentified men -- one armed with a pistol -- abducted Ashraf Shaban, the editor-in-chief of the Urdu-language daily "Al-Safa", from the newspaper's offices in Srinagar, Kashmir, and forced him into an auto-rickshaw taxi. Shaban has not been seen since and no one has claimed responsibility for his abduction. Shaban, who assumed the editorship of "Al-Safa" following his...

On 8 July 1996, an Indian-backed counter-insurgency militia kidnapped and detained 19 journalists in Kashmir. The journalists, who were released unharmed that same evening, were held as hostages by the militia to secure a meeting with the editors of Kashmir's leading newspapers. The 19 journalists were traveling together from Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, to a press conference called by...

On 17 May 1996, journalist and human rights activist Parag Kumar Das was shot by unidentified gunmen in Guwahati, in the northeastern state of Assam. Das, the editor-in-chief of the daily "Asomiya Pratidin", was picking his son up from school when three men drove up in an automobile and opened fire. Das was shot at least eight times. His seven year-old son, Rohan Das, sustained an injury to his...

On 10 April 1996, the body of Kashmiri newspaper editor Ghulam Rasool Sheikh was found in the state's Jhelum river. Sheikh had been missing since late March, when family members said that he was kidnapped by an Indian-backed militia. Local police, on the other hand, contend that he was abducted and slain by separatist guerrillas. The editor of two Kashmiri newspapers, the Urdu- language daily...