News

The director of the Mauritanian news website Taqadoumy ( http://www.taqadoumy.com), Hanevy Ould Dehah, has been arrested on the orders of the prosecutor’s office in the capital Nouakchott, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) . The arrest followed a defamation complaint by presidential election candidate, Ibrahima Moctar Sarr, president of the opposition party Alliance for Justice and...

Seven Gambian journalists charged with sedition last week for criticising the president have been freed on bail, while two other detainees were released without charge, local journalists and the press union told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Monday. Magistrate Sainabou Wadda, presiding in Kanifing Court, outside the capital, Banjul, Monday granted bail of 200,000 dalasi, (US$7,547)...

A crackdown against journalists and cyber-dissidents is continuing in Iran with both Iranian and foreign journalists caught in the eye of the post-election storm, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. Among the latest arrests was that of a correspondent for the US magazine Newsweek, Maziar Bahari, picked up at his home in Tehran on June 21. “The authorities are using all possible methods to...

Iranian security agents arrested about 25 employees of Kalameh Sabz, the reformist newspaper owned by presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, after raiding the paper's offices on Monday evening, according to local and international news reports. Alireza Beheshti, the paper's editor-in-chief, told the Farsi-language service of Deutsche-Welle that the agents, in plain clothes but armed, rounded...

American reporter David Rohde and his Afghan fixer Tahir Ludin have managed to escape from their Taliban captors who had been holding them for the past seven months. Their driver, Asadullah Mangal, is still being held. According to the New York Times, Rohde and Ludin escaped from the compound in which they were being held in North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, on June 19 and made their...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on Iranian authorities to release all journalists detained in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election and to lift the onerous press restrictions that are choking information at a time when the country and the world most need it. At least 13 journalists detained during a week of protests were still in government custody as of late Monday...

The Islamic Republic of Iran now ranks alongside China as the world’s biggest prison for journalists, according to Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) . The crackdown has been intensified yet again following Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s endorsement of the result of the June 12 presidential election and the opposition’s decision to call another demonstration on June 20. Iran now has a...

Officers of the Colombo Crimes Division (CCD) questioned the two journalists, editors of Sinhalese dailies, recently in an attempt to force them to reveal their sources for articles on sensitive subjects, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The editor of one of the newspapers, who asked not to be named, said members of the CCD went to his newspaper’s headquarters on the morning of June...

[Updates earlier story] Five-year prison sentences have been handed down by a military court in Cameroon to Jacques Blaise Mvié and Charles René Nwé, respectively deputy managing director and editor of weekly La Nouvelle for publishing “defence secrets," Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. To date, neither of the two journalists has actually been arrested. “The sentence...

A magistrate in the Gambian capital, Banjul, has charged seven journalists with sedition for criticizing President Yahya Jammeh's televised comments about the unsolved 2004 murder of editor Deyda Hydara, their defence lawyer said. Gambian security forces arrested an eighth journalist Thursday morning, although no charges were immediately brought, the committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has...