State Impunity

Kyrgyzstan authorities have closed the investigation into the October murder of Alisher Saipov, editor of the independent Uzbek-language weekly Siyosat (Politics), according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). This is the second time authorities have officially closed the investigation in as many months. The Saipov family told New York-based CPJ that the local bureau of the Kyrgyz...

Five years after a series of US military strikes against news media outlets in Baghdad killed three journalists, there are calls on the US military to fully investigate the incidents and make its findings public. So far, impunity has ruled. On April 8, 2003, a US tank fired a single shell on the Palestine Hotel, the main base for dozens of international journalists covering the US-led invasion of

Questioning of new witness in the Serbian journalist Slavko Ćuruvija's murder case has resumed, according to Tanjug news agency. In a supplement to the application for an investigation to be carried out, the Special Prosecution recently proposed questioning a further 10 to 15 new witness, and as well for a medical-ballistic forensic examination to be performed. The names of the witness, as well as...

Two gendarmes have testified in court that they told their superiors about plans to kill journalist Hrant Dink six months before his murder on January 19, 2007, but their superiors did nothing and later threatened them with reprisals if they mentioned the information. The gendarmes from the northeastern city of Trabzon, Okan Simsek and Veysel Sahin, who are on trial for failing to react after...

Two journalists who covered the volatile North Caucasus have been murdered in Russia in the last 24 hours, the first such killings in nearly a year. The motives are still unclear. Firefighters found the body of Ilyas Shurpayev, a correspondent for Russian state television’s Channel One, in his Moscow apartment early Friday morning. He had been strangled and stabbed. The perpetrators had apparently...

The first-ever detailed report on the plight of Iraqi journalists who have been forced into exile was released by Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) today, the eve of the fifth anniversary of the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Most of these journalists fled to Jordan or Syria after receiving threats or surviving murder attempts. Hundreds are trying to live a normal life again in Amman or...

The Sri Lankan army took control yesterday of public Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (SLRC) television. The army and police sealed off all roads leading to the station in the morning, preventing more than 200 staff from getting to work after employees threatened to strike in protest against a series of assaults by men “suspected of acting on behalf of a minister”. The takeover of the television...

A journalist with a leading Azerbaijani newspaper who had to be hospitalised last week after being stabbed in the chest by a miscreant, has been released. acording to Arif Aliyev, chairman of the Editors Association Yeni Nasil, Four unidentified assailants encircled Agil Khalil, a reporter with the opposition daily Azadlig (Freedom), as he was leaving his office in the evening of March 13. One...

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has expressed concern at Nicaragua's commutation of sentences in the cases of the convicted murderers of journalists María José Bravo and Carlos Guadamuz, a development that it claimed "adds to the climate of impunity surrounding freedom of the press in Latin America." According to a report in the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa this week, justices of the...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has welcomed the surrender of a suspect to police in the 2004 murder of Filipino broadcaster Herson Hinolan, but is concerned that the move came shortly after the withdrawal of an important prosecution witness from the case. Alfredo Arcenio, a former mayor of the town of Lezo, turned himself in to the Regional Trial Court in the nearby town of Kalibo...