State Impunity

Pyuthan based radio journalist Keshav Bohara was released Thursday night, according to nepalnews.com. This followed sustained pressure from organisations like the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) and National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Bohara, who is a radio journalist associated with Radio Mandavi of Pyuthan, contacted a police post at Gorusingay of Kapilvastu district at around 10...

The Somali Islamist insurgent group Hizbul Islam warned Somali media against covering celebrations of the country’s 50th anniversary Thursday, according to news reports. Hizbul Islam chief Mo’allin Hashi Farah told local radio stations that if they covered today’s celebrations they would “face bad consequences,” a report from Sapa-AFP said. “We call on the Muslim people to avoid commemorating what...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has demanded action to secure the immediate release of two French journalists and their three Afghan assistants who have been held hostage since their abduction six months ago and a Japanese journalist missing for three months. Stéphane Taponier, Hervé Ghesquière, and their three Afghan assistants, working for France 3, were taken hostage in the...

A radio reporter in Nepal, Keshav Bohara, was abducted on Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. The Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) told CPJ in an email message that a group claiming to have abducted Bohara contacted the secretary of the FNJ chapter in Pyuthan, Deepak Bhandari, by phone at 3 p.m. on Wednesday. FNJ quoted Bhandari as saying: “In the background I...

A former deputy director of the national Colombian intelligence agency has been ordered held for masterminding the 1999 murder of journalist Jaime Garzón. José Miguel Narváez is currently behind bars awaiting trial in a separate case. The attorney-general’s office issued the order on Tuesday after three former paramilitary leaders implicated Narváez in Garzón’s murder, the national daily El Tiempo...

Eight journalists were critically wounded in a bomb attack on Tuesday. The attack took place at a police school in the Abdiasis district of northern Mogadishu, according to the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ). The journalists were wounded after a bomb exploded at the police training facility where an Al-Shabaab spokesman was holding a press conference. Al-Shabaab took over the base on...

Faiz Muhammad Sasoli, a reporter based in Khuzdar District, in the southwestern province of Balochistan, was killed in hail of submachine-gunfire Sunday, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Sasoli, who worked for the Aaj Kal daily newspaper and the Independent News of Pakistan agency, had escaped two previous murder attempts. His death brings to six the number of media workers killed...

An unidentified attacker gunned down TV journalist Luis Arturo Mondragón late Monday night in the city of El Paraíso, eastern Honduras, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Mondragón, 53, owner and news director for the cable television station Channel 19, was shot to death as he left work at around 10 p.m. in El Paraíso, near the border with Nicaragua. A police spokesman...

An Indonesian newspaper reporter in the western province of Aceh has had to go into hiding after being threatened and beaten by an army officer over a report about illegal logging, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The reporter, who just uses the name Ahmadi, works for the local daily Harian Aceh. “It is unacceptable just days after World Environment Day on June 5 that a journalist is...

Important testimony was given at the 13th hearing in the trial of Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s alleged killers in Istanbul on May 10, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). A witness, whose identity was not revealed, identified three of the defendants as being at the scene of Dink’s fatal shooting outside his newspaper on January 19, 2007. Testifying that the main suspect...