Africa

Twenty-nine members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), a worldwide coalition of press freedom groups, have voiced their support for the open letter which fellow IFEX members Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Journalist in Danger (JED), its partner organisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sent to President Joseph Kabila August 30. Voicing concern about the...

Dickson Ssentongo, a news presenter on Prime Radio, a Seventh Day Adventist station in the southeastern district of Mukono, was beaten to death by unidentified assailants using metal bars as he walked to work on September 16, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Ssentongo's murder came just three days after radio and TV reporter Paul Kiggundu was lynched by...

Madagascar has released on conditions ten Radio Fahazavana employees who have been in pre-trial detention since May 27. Broadcasts of another radio station, Radio Mahafaly, have however been suspended until further notice. The 10 Radio Fahazavana employees who were released on September 8 are editor-in-chief Josiane Ranaivo, five of the station's other journalists (Lolo Ratsimba, Jaona Raôly...

Motorcycle taxi drivers beat freelance journalist Paul Kiggundu to death Saturday evening, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The drivers, commonly known as boda-boda, attacked Kiggundu while he was filming some of them demolishing a house in a town outside of Kalisizio, southwest Uganda. Local journalists told CPJ that the drivers were...

Jullson Eninga, the editor of the daily Le Journal in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was released Tuesday, one day after the Kinshasa/Kalamu high court acquitted him of treason on the grounds that neither the facts of the case nor the legality of the charge had been established. “We are delighted that Eninga is finally free, especially as there was no basis for the charge on which he was placed...

Alberto Graves Chakussanga, an Angolan radio journalist with a station critical of the ruling MPLA government was gunned down on Sunday. Chakussanga's neighbours and relatives found the journalist lying in a corridor of his home in Luanda's Viana district with a bullet in his back early Sunday morning. He had been the presenter of a weekly, Umbundu-language news call-in programme on private Radio...

Police in Kenya said Monday they had arrested a radio journalist on suspicion of links to a bombing in neighbouring Uganda which killed 76 people in July. Habib Suleiman, a presenter on Radio Salaam based in the coastal city of Mombasa, was arrested on Saturday and taken to Nairobi for questioning, regional police chief Leo Nyongesa said. "We have handed him over to the anti-terrorism police unit...

A man said to be a close ally of President Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia has filed a lawsuit in the United States of America against the US-based online Freedom Newspaper, its editor Pa Nderry M'Bai, and Freedom Newspaper Incorporated, the publishers. Amadou Samba, a businessman and the publisher of pro-government Banjul-based Daily Observer newspaper, is demanding that Freedom Newspaper make public...

Togo's President, Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé, has filed three more defamation suits against two privately-owned newspapers. Two of the suits were brought against the weekly L'Indépendant Express. This brings to three the number of cases that President Gnassingbé has launched against L'Indépendant Express since August 18. The Media Foundation for West Africa's (MFWA) correspondent in Togo reported...

Two resident district commissioners (RDC) arrested Red Pepper Publications Ltd photojournalist Tony Kizito over the alleged publication of a defamatory story by Kamunye newspaper, a vernacular sister paper of Red Pepper, Kampala-based Human Rights Network for Journalists(HRNJ) has reported. Kizito, 28, was arrested on August 30. He was on his way to the Mukono town council when he was intercepted...