Corruption and Crime

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 28 November 2007, the police captured Nazario Coronel Ramírez, a.k.a. "Chamaya", the alleged perpetrator of the murder of journalist Miguel Pérez Julca, which took place in March 2007 in the city of Jaén, northeastern Peru. Coronel Ramírez was detained in Saposoa, a town in the province of Huallaga, San Martín region. After a week of surveillance, 10 policemen sent from Jaén...

On October 7, 2006, after a six-month trial, the three hired assassins who killed Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a Filipino newspaper columnist and radio commentator who probed government corruption, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Marlene Garcia-Esperat was an accidental journalist. A chemist for the agriculture department on the southern island of Mindanao in the early 1990s, she was scrounging to...

An arm of the Russian prosecutor-general has decided to open a criminal probe into the mysterious July 2003 death of Yuri Shchekochikhin, deputy editor of the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “We welcome this important if overdue step on behalf of Russian prosecutors to uncover the truth about the death of our colleague Yuri Shchekochikhin,” Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Executive

The nondescript town of Oaxaca, about 520 km southeast of capital Mexico City, has been gathering a lot of international media attention for all the wrong reasons. Three distributors of the newspaper El Imparcial del Istmo were attacked and shot dead on October 8 on a highway in Oaxaca, following weeks of threats made to the paper, the National Centre for Social Communication (Centro Nacional de

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) expressed again today its concern for the May 10 disappearance of journalists Gamaliel López and Gerardo Paredes of TV Azteca Noroeste and at the lack of progress in the investigations into their whereabouts. López is a reporter and Paredes a cameraman for the TV station located in Monterrey, in the northern Mexico state of Nuevo León. According to...

A court in Russia’s west-central republic of Tatarstan has convicted five members of a criminal gang in the 2000 murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Igor Domnikov, the newspaper reported Thursday. The convictions are the first involving a journalist murdered for his or her work since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). During that time, CPJ found, 14 journalists have been...

An investigative journalist in Sri Lanka has been facing death threats after he made startling revelations about Sri Lanka’s purchase of Mig-27 fighter jets from Ukraine. Press freedom organisation have urged European and US embassies to do their utmost to protect Iqbal Athas of the Sunday Times, after receiving an email from the journalist in which he said he feared for his life and had gone into...

Most journalists in Canada feel the conditions that they work in are dangerous. More than 80 per cent of TV camera operators and half of broadcast reporters have been assaulted or threatened with injury at least once while doing their current job. In the print sector, more than 75 per cent of photographers and almost 30 per cent of reporters have been assaulted or threatened with injury. Of those...

The worldwide journalist death toll has risen sharply this year with 100 lives lost within six months, threatening even the record level reached in 2006. According to the International News Safety Institute (INSI), 83 journalists and 17 other media professionals have died covering news stories between January 1 and June 26, compared with 68 at the same time last year. INSI recorded a total of 168...

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has vowed to protect journalists in the Philippines, but their death toll has risen to 53 under her administration. While the country’s press remains one of the freest and most vibrant communities of journalists in Southeast Asia, its members — particularly those outside Metro Manila and other major urban centers — have been targets of violence for years