Corruption and Crime

The Committee to Protect Journalists has welcomed a Supreme Court ruling in the Philippines granting a change of trial venue in the case against two suspects charged with ordering the March 2005 murder of investigative reporter Marlene Garcia-Esperat. The Supreme Court handed down the ruling on August 26 and Manila-based press freedom group Centre for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR)...

Contravía, a TV current affairs programme that was forced off the air by threats eight months ago, resumed broadcasting on the Canal Uno public TV channel Thursday. Produced by freelance journalist Hollman Morris, Contravía has long occupied an important place in the Colombian media, above all because of its coverage of the country’s nearly half-century-old civil war. Reporters Sans Frontières...

A Ljubljana District Court has rejected Slovene daily Dnevnik's appeal against a temporary injunction that stops the paper reporting on an Italian businessman's alleged involvement in a corruption scandal, the International Press Institute (IPI) has reported. The injunction, which carries fines of up to €500,000 for failure to comply, relates to articles printed in Dnevnik on July 29 in which the...

Four suspects, including a policeman, have been arrested over Franco-Spanish journalist Christian Poveda's murder in El Salvador, police said, indicating the killing was ordered by a jailed gang member, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. "After an investigation, four people have been detained for involvement in the murder of Mr Poveda," assistant police director Mauricio Ramirez said. Poveda...

A journalist who broke the story of a Russian cargo ship apparently hijacked by pirates has fled Russia fearing for his life, the Guardian has reported. Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the online maritime bulletin Sovfracht, said he had left the country after receiving a menacing late-night phone call. The newspaper reported: [ Link] Voitenko said an unidentified man called him on the night of...

Ukrainian forensic experts have concluded that the skull that was found with the help of Gen Olexy Pukach, a former interior ministry intelligence officer who was arrested on July 21, is that of Heorhiy Gongadze, a journalist who was murdered in September 2000. This was announced at a news conference recently by Valentyna Telychenko, the lawyer of Gongadze’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze. “We take...

For the second time in less than a month, the lead federal investigator in the case of a journalist murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has been shot and killed in the streets of that city, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. The second investigator, Pablo Pasillas Fong, was shot 13 times on August 26. In addition, on August 28, the head of the office in charge of investigating...

The editor of a weekly in the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico has gone into hiding after a shootout at his residence, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The police and judicial authorities investigating a the attack on the home of Guillermo Soto Bejarano, the De Opinión’s editor, on August 30 in Salina Cruz should work on the assumption that it was linked to his journalist activities...

The bullet-ridden body of journalist Christian Poveda, whose new documentary on a violent Salvadoran street gang was scheduled for wide release this month, was discovered Wednesday afternoon just north of the capital, San Salvador. Salvadoran police found Poveda's body sprawled near his car on an isolated road in the town of Tonacatepeque, about 10 miles (15 kilometers) from the capital, the New...

Anibal Dos Santos Junior, also known as Anibalzinho, the fugitive killer of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, has been recaptured in South Africa. Mozambican police travelled Thursday to Pretoria to bring Dos Santos back to finish serving a 30-year sentence for Cardoso’s November 2000 murder. Dos Santos has escaped three times since he was first arrested for Cardoso’s murder. His most...