Afghanistan

A local journalist has been killed by unknown armed men in Afghanistan's northwest Faryab province, said a local official Monday. "Two armed men riding a motorbike opened fire on Rahman Qul near his home in Ankhoi district Sunday afternoon and killed him on the spot," provincial governor Abdul Latif Ibrahimi told Xinhua. It is not clear if the attackers were militants and an investigation is...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders condemned Taliban reprisals against the press in North Waziristan in response to an inaccurate report carried by several national and international media. A journalist's son was kidnapped for several hours, media offices were attacked, copies of newspapers were burned and a two-day ban on newspaper distribution was proclaimed. "The Taliban reaction to an...

KABUL (Reuters) - An Italian journalist kidnapped in southern Afghanistan three weeks ago said after his release on Friday he was tired but happy his ordeal was over. Gabriele Torsello, a 36-year-old, London-based photojournalist taken by armed men from a public bus in the most dangerous part of the country, spoke briefly to journalists at the Italian embassy in Kabul, near the headquarters of the...

New York, October 20, 2006—Ahead of the deadline set by the kidnappers of an Italian photographer in Afghanistan, the Committee to Protect Journalists appeals for his immediate safe release. Freelancer Gabriele Torsello was seized by five gunmen October 12. At first, the kidnappers set a deadline of Sunday night for their demands to be met. That has now changed to midnight Monday, according to the...

KABUL, Oct 19 (Pajhwok Afghan News): The Italian journalist, who was kidnapped in Afghanistan, Thursday appealed media and fellow-journalists to help him in his release from the clutches of abductors. Arranging his talks with Pajhwok Afghan News by the kidnappers from undisclosed location, Gabriele Torsello said he was under constant threat and extreme pressure from his abductors. His words were...

KABUL (Reuters) - A group which said it kidnapped Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello in the Taliban's southern Afghan heartland called aid workers on Sunday to say he was "fine" and they would make their ransom demands soon. Peacereporter ( www.peacereporter.net), a Web site specialising in reports from conflict zones, said Torsello's kidnappers called a hospital run by Italian aid group...

KABUL (Reuters) - Gunmen kidnapped an Italian photojournalist in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, accusing him of spying, an Afghan news agency reported. The Pajhwok agency named the journalist simply as Gabriele and reported a call to his Cmobile phone had been answered by someone who said: "We are the Taliban and we have abducted the foreigner on charges of spying." The Italian online newspaper...

WASHINGTON – Aman Feda, an Afghan-born mortgage broker, cringed at his 13-year-old niece’s choice of music, the hip-hop blaring from the car radio, the lyrics grating on his nerves as they drove home after shopping at a mall. “Why not listen to some Afghan music?” Feda asked casually. “What music?” he remembers her saying with a shrug of her shoulders. “There’s nothing.” The exchange sparked Feda...

Under Afghanistan’s post-Taleban government the country has seen an unprecedented flourishing of the media, but the apparent choice of print publications belies the fact that no one is actually reading them. The easiest explanation should be Afghanistan’s high rates of illiteracy, especially but not only among women. Yet that does not appear to be the main reason - instead, the papers themselves...

New York, July 24, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the killing of Aryana television cameraman Abdul Qodus, who died in a double suicide bombing in the Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday. Qodus had arrived at the scene of a suicide car bomb when a second attacker with explosives strapped to his body blew himself up, according to the Kabul-based Committee to Protect Afghan...