ARCHIVES: State Persecution
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 activist Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza. Although Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip’s government since... MORE
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has joined a renewed call by BBC staff worldwide for the immediate and unconditional release of the BBC’s correspondent in Tajikistan, Urinboy Usmonov , who has been held since June 13 in the northwestern town of Kujand and said it was very concerned about his plight. “The apparent dropping of the charge of belonging to an illegal political party, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, shows how very flimsy the accusations against him are,” the... MORE
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 . Both are now the subject of a judicial investigation and are being held at the Addis Ababa centre... MORE
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 court reduced to one year on May 2011. As a result, he had been due to be released on July 3. Now he... MORE
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 unauthorised demonstration under article of 201 of the civil code. The two women, who were fired from... MORE
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 sailing with the flotilla would be deliberately violating Israeli law and could be denied entry to... MORE
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 should be released conditionally and placed under judicial control pending trial. Hildid was... MORE
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 Cipinang high-security prison in Jakarta, where he spent eight months. He was jailed as a result of... MORE
Video footage of a Tamil journalist apparently executed in the final stages of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war underscores the need for an urgent international inquiry, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The UK's Channel 4 has screened amateur footage of the body of Tamil news presenter Shoba , indicating that she was shot and killed during the government's final military surge in the northeast. Shoba, who went by one name, also reported under the name Isaipriya or Isaippiriya for... MORE
Waqar Kiani , a Pakistani journalist who was assaulted Saturday night by men in police uniforms, told New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that he fears for his safety and the safety of his wife and two young children. The attack came five days after Kiani, 32, had written a story the UK Guardian newspaper about being abducted and tortured in 2008. On Saturday evening in Islamabad, men stopped the Guardian journalist and ordered him from his car. Kiani said... MORE
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