The Israel-Hezbollah conflict has claimed its first journalist. Layal Nejib, a photographer working for a Lebanese magazine was killed Sunday when her taxi was hit by a shrapnel as Israeli warplanes bombarded a convoy of people feeling their homes near Tyre in southern Lebanon. Nejib, 23, is the first journalist to be killed in Israel's offensive to push back Hezbollah guerrillas who captured two...
Israel is fast catching up with its adversaries in its attacks on the press. Seven journalists and media workers were injured in a space of two days during attacks carried out by Israeli forces in Lebanon earlier this week. Two Palestinian photographers were shot at last week in the Gaza area. BOMBED OUT: The compound of buildings housing the television station of the Lebanese Shiite militant...
Twenty-eight months after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak promised to initiate legislations to decriminalise press offences comes a new law which does not do enough to protect journalists from prosecution for reporting stories critical of the government. The law, in fact, sharply increases fines for defamation. The National Assembly, controlled by Mubarak's National Democratic Party, passed the...
AMMAN, Jordan, July 11 (UPI) -- The family of a Jordanian journalist killed in U.S. shelling of Baghdad a day before it fell in April 2003 will sue the White House and the Pentagon. The widow and daughter of the Qatari al-Jazeera television correspondent Tarek Ayyoub will file a lawsuit through the American judiciary on charges that the shelling of the news agency's offices in Baghdad was pre...
Iraq is the deadliest war on record for news people. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 74 journalists have been killed there since the bombing of Baghdad began in 2003. And there have been plenty of near-misses. NBC's David Bloom died of a pulmonary embolism in the early weeks of the war while riding in a tank. ABC's Bob Woodruff was seriously injured last January, and CBS's...
THE voice on the telephone was that of a trusted contact whose advice on security in Iraq has often been a source of reassurance. But the message he passed on last Wednesday and the urgency of his tone could hardly have been more alarming: my name had been placed on a hit list by one of the groups whose death threats have spread fear through countless communities in this stricken country. “A...
BAGHDAD, June 28 (Reuters) - Iraq on Wednesday accused al Qaeda militants of killing a correspondent for the al Arabiya satellite channel in February. Atwar Bahjat disappeared with her cameraman Khaled Al Falahi and soundman Adnan Khairallah near Samarra as she reported on a bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in the town on Feb. 22. Their bodies were found the following morning. Iraq's National Security...
British broadcasters are making a series of fictionalised accounts of the Iraq war that will include a controversial Channel 4 dramatisation of soldiers abusing prisoners. Screenwriter Tony Marchant's new drama, The Mark of Cain, which began filming this month in Tunisia, draws on stories such as that of Fusilier Gary Bartlam, who was arrested in 2003 after trying to develop a roll of film that...
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 (IPS) - If one were to ask Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena why she chose to report from Afghanistan, Algeria, Somalia and Iraq prior to February 2005, despite the many perils that face reporters in war zones and areas of conflict, her response would probably be similar to the one she gave to journalist Amy Goodman of the radio news show Democracy Now!. "I can't go only...
Journalists from all over the world Thursday joined journalists in Iraq in their appeal for action to curb the violence against media staff which has claimed at least 130 lives in just three years. A statement from a global Committee for the Defence of Journalists in Iraq also highlighted a worldwide humanitarian appeal to help the media victims of violence. THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS: An Iraqi journalist...
