State Impunity

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed outrage at Panama's decision to offer political asylum to María del Pilar Hurtado, a former head of Colombia’s leading intelligence agency, the Administrative Department of Security (DAS). Hurtado is due to go to the Panamanian consulate in Bogotá today to receive documents allowing her to travel to Panama. Panama’s...

Mazen Mardan al-Baghdadi, a reporter for Al-Mosuliya television, was gunned down on Sunday in front of his home, according to news reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called on Iraqi authorities to thoroughly and transparently investigate the murder. Three armed men showed up at the journalist's house on Sunday at 6 p.m. and told al-Baghdadi's father they were with military...

Four journalists are still missing in the southwestern state of Michoacán, one of the epicentres of the federal offensive against the drug cartels that President Felipe Calderón launched on taking office in December 2006, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). José Antonio García Apac, the editor of the local weekly Ecos de la Cuenca, has been missing the...

Journalist Tumba Lumembu was freed on November 15, exactly two months after he was arrested on a Kinshasa street, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. A reporter for the newspaper La Tempête des Tropiques, he was abducted on a street in the capital on September 14 by members of the National Intelligence Agency (ANR). When President Joseph Kabila attended a...

Two incidents in recent weeks have again highlighted the dangers for journalists in Pakistan. One is the detention of Ghulam Rasool Khan in the eastern province of Punjab without due process since November 3. The other is the disappearance of Abdul Hameed Hayatan, also known as Lala Hameed, in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where his colleagues think he was abducted by security...

Russia's top investigator, Aleksandr Bastrykin, has ordered the reopening of a probe into a near-lethal November 2008 attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda. Bastrykin's order on Thursday comes a day after a court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki convicted Beketov of criminally slandering local mayor Vladimir Strelchenko. The conviction, coming at a time...

During the 15th hearing Monday in the trial in Istanbul of newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s alleged killers, the court rejected the Dink family’s request for the murder to be reenacted in the presence of alleged hitman Ogün Samast at the spot where Dink was gunned down, outside the office of his Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in the Istanbul district of Sisli. In a surprise development, the court...

Pakistan must take immediate steps to rein in police and government agencies that threaten reporters. Two cases in recent days—those of journalists Hafiz Imran and Umar Cheema—demonstrate how reporting on stories that are critical of the authorities can bring officials' wrath down on reporters. "It's deeply disturbing to hear that journalists are receiving death threats under Pakistan's new...

A popular Angolan radio commentator, whose satirical broadcasts have been critical of the government, was injured in a stabbing this morning in the capital city of Luanda, according to local journalists and news reports. António Manuel Manuel Da Silva, better known as "Jójó," was walking home around 3 a.m. when he was stabbed by an attacker who confronted him about his program on private Radio...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over the health of imprisoned Tunisian journalist Fahem Boukadous. It has called upon the Tunisian government to release him immediately. Boukadous, who suffers from acute asthma, started a hunger strike on October 8 to protest the conditions of his detention at Gafsa prison, about 229 miles (369 km) southwest of Tunis. According to...