Conflict Journalism

Three defendants in the October 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya walked free out of the Moscow District Military Court Friday after a jury unanimously acquitted them of helping to organise the crime. The state prosecution said it will appeal the verdict, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported. Those acquitted are Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police...

Hearings in the murder case of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya continue at the Moscow District Military Court. On February 4, the judge announced yet another adjournment of the proceedings, this time because of the sudden loss in court of a DVD featuring video materials that the prosecutor wanted to present as evidence against the defendants, the Glasnost Defence Foundation (GDF)...

An unidentified Pretoria News journalist was shot six times by the police during a standoff between the police and students at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria on February 11. Several people were injured when police fired a barrage of rubber bullets at hundreds of students protesting at the university. The journalist was rushed to hospital by paramedics, according to the Media...

A Tamil journalist was killed in a Sri Lankan Army bombardment on the north of the country, an incident that the has been described by Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) as a "war crime". Punniyamurthy Sathyamurthy was killed during an air raid on February 12 on Thevipuram, Mullaithivu district in the region of Vanni, being fought over by the army and rebel Tamil Tigers (LTTE). He had recently filed...

Geo TV and the News daily correspondent Musa Khankhel was shot dead Wednesday in Pakistan's northwest Swat Valley. No group has claimed responsibility for the killing, the first violation of a truce called Monday between the government and local militant groups. Khankhel had been covering a peace march led by Muslim cleric Sufi Muhammad, the father-in-law of local Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah...

Press freedom violations in Colombia have seen a substantial decline. In the past year, there were 130 violations of press freedom. This represents a decrease of approximately 20 per cent compared to 2007, when 162 violations were recorded. In 2008 there were no job-related murders of journalists. This is a fact worth emphasising in a country like Colombia, where more than 130 journalists have

Sudan has expelled a foreign journalist for reporting on the country's Darfur crisis and arms industry. Canadian-Egyptian reporter Heba Aly, who wrote for US news agency Bloomberg, Boston-based Christian Science Monitor newspaper and the United Nations news service IRIN, left the country last week. She told colleagues that officers from Sudan's security service contacted her and ordered her to...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned Saturday's brutal knife attack on Hassan Bulhan, director of a local radio station in the central town of Abudwaq. Bulhan was stabbed at least five times in the chest and abdomen during a clan reconciliation meeting, two local journalists told CPJ, in what was the second attack on a Somali journalist in just four days. Bulhan was in stable...

A reporter-cameraman of a privately-owned TV station in Madagascar was shot dead while covering an anti-government demonstration outside the presidential palace in capital Antananarivo on February 7. The 25-year-old Ando Ratovonirina of Radio et Télévision Analamanga (RTA) was among the scores of people who were killed or wounded when security forces opened fired on the protesters, according to...

On two occasions, police officers in Tijuana, Baja California, northwestern Mexico, have raided the offices of the local weekly Balún Canán without a search warrant and have threatened and assaulted reporters, ARTICLE 19 and the Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social (CENCOS) have reported. In an interview, Juan Alfonso Ojeda, the editor and founder of Balún Canán, told CENCOS and ARTICLE 19 that...