State Impunity

On the 10th anniversary of Tamil journalist Mayilvaganam Nimalarajan’s murder in the northern city of Jaffna, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reiterated its hope that the Sri Lankan government will finally relaunch the police investigation into his death. The Jaffna correspondent of the BBC’s Tamil and Sinhalese-language services and the Sri Lankan newspapers...

Four years after Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow her killers have yet to be brought to justice. Repeatedly criticised by rights groups over its handling of the case, the Russian government recently announced it was reinvigorating the investigation, and those involving 18 other...

Detectives with the federal Investigative Committee, the Russian agency responsible for investigating serious crimes, say they are probing a widening circle of suspects in the 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Agency officials made the disclosure during a September 28 meeting in Moscow with a delegation from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)...

The South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO) has condemned the physical assault on Blic newspaper correspondent Gvozden Zdravic in Aleksandrovac, Serbia. On September 30, Gvozden Zdravic was physically assaulted while on duty. Zdravic was photographing the local courthouse when the driver of the mayor of Aleksandrovac allegedly ran out of the courthouse and physically abused Zdravic by...

An enquiry ordered by Cameroon's president into a journalist’s death in prison last April has come to exactly the same conclusions as to the cause of death as the explanation originally offered by the authorities, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The findings of the investigation into the death of Cameroun Express editor Ngota Ngota Germain (aka Bibi...

Authorities in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa must thoroughly investigate Thursday's murder of Mujeebur Rehman Siddique, the second killing of a journalist in the province in one week, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Gunmen shot Siddique, local correspondent for the Islamabad-based, Urdu-language daily Pakistan in the town of Dargai as he was leaving a mosque on Thursday evening...

Unidentified gunmen in Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on Tuesday shot at journalist Luis Galdámez Álvarezn outside his home, the journalist himself told New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Galdámez was uninjured. Galdámez, a reporter for the national broadcaster Radio Globo and Globo TV, was going into his house in the neighborhood of Villa Centroamericana...

Dickson Ssentongo, a news presenter on Prime Radio, a Seventh Day Adventist station in the southeastern district of Mukono, was beaten to death by unidentified assailants using metal bars as he walked to work on September 16, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Ssentongo's murder came just three days after radio and TV reporter Paul Kiggundu was lynched by...

Former interior minister Yuri Kravchenko, who took his own life in unclear circumstances in 2005, was the sole instigator of the September 2000 abduction and murder of opposition journalist Georgiy Gongadze, the Ukraine attorney-general’s office announced on September 14, saying the pre-trial investigation into the case was now virtually concluded. An online newspaper editor who was very critical...

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the Turkish state failed in its duty to prevent newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s murder by acting on the information it had about plots against him, and violated his freedom of expression before his murder. The human rights court on September 14 ordered Turkey to pay his widow, Rakel Dink, and his children 100,000 euros in compensation and his brother...