2005-2014

Mortar shells destroyed the Radio Voice of Democracy building Monday morning in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, killing Amal Abukar, 22, the wife of the director of the station, Abdirahman Yasin, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Abukar died instantly after three mortar shells landed on the station’s building in northern Mogadishu at 10:30 a.m., local...

The decision to jail a blogger and an Internet café owner is an escalation in Morocco’s already intense campaign against journalists and bloggers, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Friday. CPJ called on Moroccan authorities to overturn both prison sentences on appeal. Blogger Bashir Hazzam, 26, was sentenced to four months in prison for “spreading false information...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the behaviour of the authorities in the southwestern province of Balochistan in letting seven days go by before admitting that they were holding Rehmatullah Shaheen, a reporter for the Baloch nationalist newspaper Daily Tawar in Bolan District. Shaheen was reported missing on December 8 but it was only after a wave of protests that the local...

Ten members of “Mara 18”, including two women, were arrested in Sopayango, in the San Salvador suburbs on December 16 in connection with the murder of the Franco-Spanish documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The killing of the photo-journalist, overnight on September 2, 2009, sent shockwaves through the profession. RSF welcomed the commitment of the...

An unidentified gunman shot and killed Colombian journalist Hárold Humberto Rivas Quevedo in the western Valle del Cauca province on the night of December 15, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. CPJ Thursday called on Colombian authorities to investigate the killing and do everything in their power to bring all those responsible to justice. Rivas, 49, host of...

Radio station owner and presenter José Givonaldo Vieira was shot dead at the door of his Brazilian offices in an act that bore the hallmarks of an execution, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Two assailants fired five shots from a car at the proprietor of Radio Bezerros who also presented a programme, in Bezerros about 100 km from Recife in the north-east on December 14. He was hit...

There has been a tit-for-tat arrests of journalists by Palestinian political rivals Hamas and Fatah of late, each side carrying out an arrest in response to an arrest by the other faction, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The latest victim is Mohammed Eshtawi, the head of pro-Hamas satellite TV station Al-Aqsa’s operations in the West Bank, who was arrested by the Palestinian...

Ahmad Zeid-Abadi, an Iranian journalist and political analyst who was imprisoned following Iran’s disputed presidential election in June, has been awarded the 2010 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Zeid-Abadi is known for an open letter he wrote from prison in 2000 protesting the judiciary’s treatment of...

A Tajik government decree charging privately-owned media for access to public information has been described as “utterly grotesque” by press freedom organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Issued on October 31, the decree “On the recovery by state institutions of the costs of presenting information” took effect on November 19. The media were not consulted about the decree, which was not...

Three journalists, all on assignment for the Guardian, were abducted in December 2009 and released after six days, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting the paper. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi, ad two unnamed Afghan journalists had been planning to interview militants in Afghanistan’s mountainous Kunar province near the border with Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province...