In a 17 April 2000 letter to the governor of Jammu and Kashmir state, Girish Chander Saxena, RSF expressed concern about the climate of violence facing the public and private press, especially after the explosion of a landmine near the building that houses the government station Radio Kashmir. RSF asked Girish Chander Saxena to order an inquiry into the incident, in order to identify those...
In a letter to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, WAN has expressed its serious concern at an attack on the home of newspaper editor Jeelani Qadri. According to reports, early on the morning of 23 November 1999, Kashmiri militants threw a grenade at the Srinigar home of Qadri, editor of the daily newspaper "Afaaq". Qadri and his family, who were asleep inside at the time, escaped unharmed...
On 27 July 1997, Habib-ullah Naqash, photojournalist for The Asian Age in Srinagar, was beaten by two policemen when stopped at a highway check point en route to cover the visit of Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral to the region. Similarly, on 8 August, Mukhtar Ahmed, a reporter for the Indian daily "The Telegraph" and a correspondent for Cable News Network (CNN), and photojournalist Arshad Ahmed...
On 27 June 1997, police assaulted Surinder Singh Oberoi, the correspondent for Agence France-Presse in Srinagar, as he and about twenty other local journalists had gathered in front of the United Nations Military Observers Group office in Srinagar. They intended to cover a demonstration by the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference which was protesting the authorities' refusal to allow them to hold a...
The 16 March 1997 slaying in Kashmir of Saidain Shafi, a contributor to programs carried on the official Indian television network Doordarshan, marks the second time in 1997 that a Kashmiri broadcast journalist has been killed and the eighth time that a journalist has been assassinated in Kashmir since an armed insurgency against Indian rule broke out in late 1989. On 16 March, two unidentified...
Altaf Ahmed Faktoo, a news reader for the state-owned Doordarshan Kendra television station in Srinagar, Kashmir, was assassinated on 1 January 1997 by suspected militant separatists. Three unidentified men entered the Crown Hotel, owned by Faktoo's family, in Srinagar's heavily patrolled LalChowk area. They fired two shots at the journalist with a silencer pistol before fleeing the scene. No one...
On 1 August 1996, three unidentified men -- one armed with a pistol -- abducted Ashraf Shaban, the editor-in-chief of the Urdu-language daily "Al-Safa", from the newspaper's offices in Srinagar, Kashmir, and forced him into an auto-rickshaw taxi. Shaban has not been seen since and no one has claimed responsibility for his abduction. Shaban, who assumed the editorship of "Al-Safa" following his...
On 8 July 1996, an Indian-backed counter-insurgency militia kidnapped and detained 19 journalists in Kashmir. The journalists, who were released unharmed that same evening, were held as hostages by the militia to secure a meeting with the editors of Kashmir's leading newspapers. The 19 journalists were traveling together from Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, to a press conference called by...
On 10 April 1996, the body of Kashmiri newspaper editor Ghulam Rasool Sheikh was found in the state's Jhelum river. Sheikh had been missing since late March, when family members said that he was kidnapped by an Indian-backed militia. Local police, on the other hand, contend that he was abducted and slain by separatist guerrillas. The editor of two Kashmiri newspapers, the Urdu- language daily...
On 6 March 1996, Ghulam Nabi Khayal, a Kashmiri journalist and correspondent for Pakistan Television (PTV), and formerly a reporter with United Press International (UPI), was threatened by three unidentified men who threw two grenades at his home located in the city of Srinagar. One of the two grenades exploded, damaging window panes in the house; however, there were no injuries. Khayal had...
