News

French journalists Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier and their Afghan interpreter Reza, who were abducted by a Taliban group on December 29, 2009 in the northeastern province of Kapisa while doing a report for the French TV station France 3, were released June 29. Kapisa governor Abdol Hakim Akhonzadeh, who was reached in the town of Tagab, told Reporters Without Borders that the journalists...

Salama Atallah, the Gaza Strip correspondent of the French TV news station France 24’s Arabic service, was interrogated by Hamas security officials on June 26 for the fourth time in a month over a report he did for the service about a clandestine Salafist group operating in Gaza. Dubbed “Palestine’s Taliban,” the group is believed to have been responsible for the April 15 murder of Italian peace...

The Sudanese justice system has decided to keep Abuzar Ali Al-Amin, the deputy editor of the opposition daily Rai Al-Shaab, in prison and to bring new charges against him based on complaints made by the security services, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Arrested in May 2010, Al-Amin was given a five-year jail sentence in July 2010 which the supreme...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the arrests of two journalists working for privately-owned newspapers in the past few days. The latest victim is Reyot Alemu, a young woman reporter for the Amharic-language weekly Fitih, who was arrested on June 21, two days after the arrest of Woubeshet Taye, the deputy editor of the Amharic-language Awramba Times...

Journalists Saodat Omonova and Malohat Eshonkulova were arrested five minutes after they began protesting and brandishing posters outside the presidential administration building in Tashkent June 27, officially celebrated as Day of the Journalist in Uzbekistan. They were taken to a local police station and then to a municipal court, where they were immediately tried and convicted of staging an...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the Israeli government’s attempts to intimidate journalists who plan to travel with a flotilla of ships that will set sail in the next few days in an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. In a message sent to journalists June 26, Israeli Government Press Office director Oren Helman said media personnel...

Tunisia’s new authorities have failed to to issue any broadcast licences in the six months since President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster. They are supposed to be building a new, free and democratic Tunisia, but no democracy will be possible without truly independent media, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) reacted. The Tunisian broadcast media landscape has not...

Gunmen from pro- and anti-government militias raided and shuttered two radio stations in Somalia in separate attacks on Wednesday, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). An armed group with links to the hardline insurgency Al-Shabaab stormed the private Voice of Hiran on Wednesday morning in the central town of Beledweyne, ordering all staff to...

Erwin Arnada, the former editor of the Indonesian version of Playboy magazine, was released June 24 after the supreme court accepted his appeal against a two-year jail sentence on a charge of indecency, overturning its own decision. He began serving the sentence last October. “Now it is proved, I am not guilty, journalism is not a crime,” Arnada said in his first Tweet after being freed from...

Six contributors to opposition radio station La Voix de Djibouti – Farah Abadid Hildid, Houssein Ahmed Farah, Houssein Robleh Dabar, Abdillahi Aden Ali, Moustapha Abdourahman Houssein and Mohamed Ibrahim Waïss – were finally released June 23 evening after more than four months in Djibouti’s Gabode prison. After several appeals to Djibouti’s supreme court, an appeal court ruled on June 22 that they...