State Impunity

Kambale Musonia, a journalist working for Radio Communautaire de Lubero Sud in Kirumba, was murdered June 21 in the eastern province of Nord-Kivu. Aged 29, Musonia was shot three times in the chest at close range at around 7:30 p.m. by three unidentified men who were waiting for him outside his home as he returned from work, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) reported...

Afaq TV cameraman Salem Alwan Al-Gharabi killed in a double suicide bombing in the southern city of Diwaniya June 21. His death brought the number of media personnel killed in Iraq since the start of the year to six, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). According to a preliminary report by the Iraqi security services, 20 people were killed and 30 were...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has deplored the June 20 physical attack by demonstrators on three TV journalists who were covering a rally in support of the Kyrgyz nationalist party Ata-Zhurt in the southern city of Osh. It again highlighted the dangers to which journalists are exposed in Kyrgyzstan as well as police bias against the media. The violence occurred...

Police in Sierra Leone have arrested three suspects, including a police officer, for the killing of a reporter this Sunday during violent clashes over a land dispute on the outskirts of the capital, Freetown, according to local journalists. Ibrahim Foday, 38, a reporter at the private daily newspaper The Exclusive, was beaten and stabbed by assailants during an outbreak of violence between...

It has been exactly 500 days since Sri Lankan journalist Prageeth Eknelygoda disappeared. He has not been seen by his wife Sandhya Eknelygoda or by the couple's two teenage sons, Sanjay and Harith, since he left for work around 7:30 a.m., on the morning of January 24, 2010. Sandhya filed a complaint with the local police office at 11:30 a.m. the next day but so far no government official has given...

The trial of three people accused of killing Kyrgyz journalist Gennady Pavlyuk in the Kazakh capital of Almaty in December 2009 by throwing him from the 6th floor of a building opened two days ago in Almaty. At the time of his death, Pavlyuk had been given the job of creating a news website and a weekly newspaper for the Kyrgyz opposition party Ata-Meken. “The decision to hold an open trial at the...

The two men who murdered journalist Birendra Shah have been awarded life imprisonment. A judge in the central Bara district sentenced Mainejar Giri and Ram Ekwal Sahini to life terms and confiscated their property on May 30, according to local news reports. The two abducted and killed Shah, a local correspondent for the Nepal FM radio station, Dristi Weekly, and Avenues TV, on October 4, 2007...

Rustam Makhmudov, the suspected hit-man in the October 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya, was arrested May 31 in Chechnya, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “The arrest of the man suspected of carrying out the Politkovskaya shooting is a major advance but many questions remain unanswered,” RSF said. “Nearly five years have gone by...

At the request of journalists’ organisations, press photographers and reporters are due to demonstrate outside the Danish embassy in Buenos Aires May 24 in protest against a brutal attack by two members of the embassy’s security staff four days ago on Julian Herr, an 18-year-old photographer employed by the magazine El Guardián. “We urge the Danish ambassador, Henrik Bramsen Hahn, to publicly...

The Libyan government should immediately release the body of South African photographer Anton Hammerl, and investigate the role of the armed forces in his death, Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Hammerl, 41, was shot and killed by government forces near Brega in eastern Libya on April 5. Three journalists traveling with him were detained by Libyan authorities...