West Asia - North Africa

Imad Abadi, the star anchor of the independent satellite TV news station Al-Diyar, was badly injured in a clearly targeted shooting attack Monday night in Baghdad, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Abadi was shot twice by unidentified gunmen as he was driving through the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Salihiya. “He suffered a gunshot wound to the head and another to the neck,” Al...

Kuwait’s prosecutor-general Tuesday ordered the police to continue holding journalist Mohammed Abdel Qader Al-Jassem at the headquarters of the criminal investigation department after he was take in for questioning the day before in connection with a libel suit by the prime minister and then refused to pay bail of 1,000 dinars (2,345 euros), Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. As Kuwait...

A Baghdad court has ruled that the London-based Guardian newspaper defamed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in an April 2009 article depicting increasing authoritarianism in his government. On Tuesday, the court fined the Guardian 100 million Iraqi dinars (US$86,000) in connection with the article, which quoted unnamed members of the intelligence service as saying that al-Maliki was...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for police to do their utmost to find those responsible for a “cowardly” physical attack on leading Iraqi Kurdish investigative journalist Nabaz Goran, who has just left Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, to seek refugee in Sulaymaniyah to the east. The 32-year-old editor of the independent Kurdish-language bi-monthly Jehan (World) ( http://www.jehan...

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has urged Moroccan King Mohammed VI to order the release of a jailed editor and to put an end to the use of the judiciary to silence independent media. Editor Driss Chahtan of the independent weekly Al-Michaal is due to appear before a Rabat appeals court on Tuesday. In mid-October, Chahtan was sentenced by a minor court to a year in prison...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) on Tuesday condemned the decision of a court specialising in press offences that sentenced journalist Munir Al-Mawari of independent weekly Al-Masdar in his absence to two years in prison for libelling President Ali Abdallah Saleh and also banned him for life from working as a journalist. The newspaper’s editor, Samir Jubran, was sentenced in the same case on...

The newly established Press and Publications Court in Sana’a sentenced Munir Mawari, a Washington-based Yemeni journalist and contributor to the independent weekly Al-Masdar, to two years in prison on charges of defaming the president, journalists told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The court also barred him for life from practicing journalism in Yemen. The court handed...

A Casablanca court Friday gave Taoufiq Bouachrine, the publisher of the Akhbar al-Youm newspaper, and cartoonist Khalid Gueddar three-year suspended jail sentences and ordered them to pay a colossal 270,000 euros in damages to Prince Moulay Ismaïl, a cousin of the king, for a cartoon of the prince published last month, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The sentences were issued as a...

One journalist was arrested and another assaulted following the re-election of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali as president for the fifth time on October 24, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Taoufik Ben Brik was arrested Thursday when he answered a summons for an alleged assault on a woman in the street last week. Everything points to the being a case trumped up by the authorities to attack...

The exclusive account of Courtney C Radsch, a US journalist who recently lost her job at the Al Arabiya news website ( www.alarabiya.net) in the United Arab Emirates for posting information about safety violations by the national air carrier, Emirates Airlines: “ On Sunday October 4 one of my reporters asked me if we could write about a report on safety concerns at Emirates Airlines following a...