Tunisian authorities must end their weeks-long crackdown on bloggers and reporters covering street protests, the Committee to Protect Journalists has demanded. Scores of journalists have been detained in the past four weeks, three of whom remain in custody. Local and international reporters have faced continued harassment, including detention, restrictions on movement, and denial of entry into the...
Geo TV reporter Wali Khan Babar was shot and killed in Karachi Thursday evening, shortly after covering gang violence in the city, according to several Pakistani journalists. At least two assailants intercepted Babar's car at 9:20 p.m., shooting him multiple times in the head and neck, Geo TV Managing Director Azhar Abbas told New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). One assailant...
Acts of intimidation and violence against journalists continue in Côte d’Ivoire, as the political crisis resulting from the November 28 presidential election drags on with no sign of a resolution in sight, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “We deplore the climate of fear in Abidjan for journalists trying to cover developments,” RSF secretary-general Jean...
The Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ) has called for a full investigation into the killing of Ilyas Nizzar, who was found dead in Pidarak, in the volatile Balochistan province, in Pakistan's southwest, on January 5. Nizzar, a general assignment reporter with the Baloch-language magazine Darwanth, had been missing and assumed abducted since December 28. According to the Pakistan Federal Union...
Yemeni journalist Fouad Rashid has been arbitrarily arrested in Al-Mukalla, a city 500 km east of Sanaa that is the capital of Hadramaut provinceaccording to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The editor of the Arabic-language news website Al-Mukalla Press, Rashid was arrested on the street on the morning of January 10 and was taken to the headquarters of the city’s...
Tunisian journalist Nissar Ben Hassen of Radio Kalima was arrested Tuesday after posting video footage of events in Chebba, 65 km north of the city of Sfax, online. He was editing another video on the violence in Mahdia at the time of his arrest, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Members of a special presidential unit arrested him shortly after midday at...
Assadolah Vahidi, editor of daily Sarnewesht, was arrested Sunday on the orders of Afghanistan’s chief prosecutor based on a complaint from President Hamid Karzai’s national security advisor, without any consultation with the Commission for Media Complaints, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). This arrest was illegal, in terms of the way it was carried out...
The former editorial manager and concessionaire of the Kurdish newspaper Azadiya Welat, Emine Demir, received a prison sentence of 138 years on charges of "spreading propaganda for the PKK", the militant Kurdistan Workers Party. The sentence is based on articles Demir accepted for publication in the paper, according to IPS Communication Foundation (BIANET). The 24-year-old journalist was convicted...
The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has welcomed the release of journalist Yusuf Ali Adan, an online reporter for Somalifans news website, whose whereabouts remained unknown until December 2010, when Puntland Intelligence Service (PIS) produced him at the Criminal Court in Bossasso town of Puntland. Adan, who was released on December 30, was first brought to the Criminal Court in...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has described as baseless and unacceptable a claim by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid that Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier, two French TV journalists who have been held hostage for the past year in northwestern Afghanistan, were “engaged in gathering information that has the nature of intelligence gathering.” “These grave...
