State Impunity

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) is supporting a request by Shakil Turabi, the editor-in-chief of the Islamabad-based South Asian News Agency (SANA), for the authorities to carry a rapid and thorough investigation into his 18-year-old son's disappearance since January 5 this year. Turabi believes that military intelligence agencies were involved in abducting his son...

Motorcycle taxi drivers beat freelance journalist Paul Kiggundu to death Saturday evening, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The drivers, commonly known as boda-boda, attacked Kiggundu while he was filming some of them demolishing a house in a town outside of Kalisizio, southwest Uganda. Local journalists told CPJ that the drivers were...

After repeated death threats, journalist Misri Khan was shot dead Tuesday by unidentified gunmen outside his office in Hangu, in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. No one claimed the killing but his son thought a religious group could have been involved. Khan was the correspondent of the dailies Mashriq and Ausaf and ran a newspaper distribution agency. Khan’s 25-year-old son, Umer...

Belarusian authorities must thoroughly investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Aleh Byabenin (Oleg Bebenin), founder and director of the Minsk-based pro-opposition news website Charter 97, press freedom groups have demanded. Byabenin's brother and several friends found the journalist hanging from a stairway in his summer house outside the capital city of Minsk on Friday at around 5...

Safa al-Din Abdel Hamid, an Al-Mosuliya television presenter who was shot Wednesday morning in front of his Mosul home by gunmen firing from a speeding car, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Abdel Hamid was the second Iraqi television anchor to be killed in as many days. Riad al-Saray, an anchor for Al-Iraqiya was gunned down in Baghdad on...

Alberto Graves Chakussanga, an Angolan radio journalist with a station critical of the ruling MPLA government was gunned down on Sunday. Chakussanga's neighbours and relatives found the journalist lying in a corridor of his home in Luanda's Viana district with a bullet in his back early Sunday morning. He had been the presenter of a weekly, Umbundu-language news call-in programme on private Radio...

A witness in the case of missing editor Vasyl Klymentyev has also gone missing, according to Petro Matvienko, deputy editor-in-chief of Noviy Stil newspaper. Matvienko refused to name the witness in order to avoid compromising the investigation, according to a report released by the UNIAN news agency. He also refused to cite the source for his information but said he had verified it. He said that...

A prominent Afghan television news journalist and political activist has been murdered near his Kabul home. Sayed Hamid Noori, who was also deputy head of Afghanistan's National Journalists' Association, was found dead of knife wounds late Sunday. "Someone called him and asked him to come down from his apartment last night. His body was found later by police in a tree-covered area near his home,"...

Two TV employees have been killed in Quetta and an investigative journalist has been abducted in Islamabad. A cameraman and a TV station driver were killed and six other journalists seriously injured in a suicide bombing on September 3 in Quetta and the ensuing acts of revenge violence by demonstrators who were targeted by the bombing. The overall death toll was 59. In Islamabad, an investigative...

There has a new surge in cases of harassment and censorship of Honduran journalists working for radio stations that have been outspoken in their criticism of the government since the June 2009 coup d'état, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Radio Uno, an educational station in the northern city of San Pedro Sula that has repeatedly criticised the regime...