State Impunity

No ransom demand. No news at all. The official investigation has not progressed in the month since María Esther Aguilar Cansimbe, a young journalist employed by the Diario de Zamora and Cambio de Michoacán newspapers in the southwestern state of Michoacán, disappeared on November 11. Nonetheless, there are reasons for thinking her disappearance was linked to her reporting and that drug traffickers...

Political analyst and columnist Alexander Knyazev was attacked near his home in Bishkek Wednesday evening by four men who punched and kicked him repeatedly and took his computer and briefcase, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. It was the second physical attack on this well-known political and media personality in the past two years and the eighth this year on journalists in Kyrgyzstan...

Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the prosecution of a man accused in the 2007 murder of Alisher Saipov, editor of the Uzbek-language weekly Siyosat, can proceed, the independent news website Ferghana reported. Saipov’s family and colleagues have called the case bogus, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The ruling came in an appeal filed by the...

Police in Nepal should thoroughly investigate reports that journalist Tika Bista was brutally attacked on Tuesday in reprisal for her work, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Wednesday. Bista was discovered unconscious near her home in Rukum district, western Nepal on Tuesday afternoon, with serious injuries to her head, legs, and arms, according to local press freedom...

Imad Abadi, the Al-Diyar TV host who suffered serious gunshot injuries to the head and neck in an attack on November 23 in Baghdad, was flown to the German city of Munich on December 3 for brain surgery, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. RSF said it was relieved to learn that the operation went ahead without any problem in Munich’s Grosshadern Clinic on December 7. Abadi’s brother...

Prominent Russian journalist Olga Kotovskaya was killed after she apparently fell from the 14th floor of a building in the centre of Kaliningrad (the capital of a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania) six days after a court ruled that she had been unfairly stripped of the TV station she had created, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Kotovskaya died on November 16, six days...

The body of José Galindo Robles, the head of Radio Universidad de Guadalajara, was discovered at his home in Guadalajara, in the western state of Jalisco, on November 24, after it was noticed that several days had gone by with no word from him, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. His body was found wrapped in a blanket and with the hands tied with cable. The prosecutor’s office said the...

A brutal election-related massacre in the Philippine province of Maguindanao on Monday appears to be single deadliest event for the press since 1992, when the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began keeping detailed records on journalist deaths. The New York Times and the Associated Press (AP) reported Wednesday that at least 18 of the victims have been preliminarily identified...

One of the main suspects in the November 2008 murder of Radio Okapi journalist Didace Namujimbo, Corp Sébastien Tandema, escaped from a cell in the 10th Military Region’s headquarters in the eastern city of Bukavu Monday, just five days after he was arrested, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) and Journalist en Danger (JED) have reported. When he appeared before military prosecutors a few days after...

Imad Abadi, the star anchor of the independent satellite TV news station Al-Diyar, was badly injured in a clearly targeted shooting attack Monday night in Baghdad, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Abadi was shot twice by unidentified gunmen as he was driving through the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Salihiya. “He suffered a gunshot wound to the head and another to the neck,” Al...