State Impunity

Suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl, a central role in 30 other attacks and plots in the US and worldwide that killed thousands of victims, said a revised transcript released Thursday by the US military. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002, is pictured in...

Masked Palestinian gunmen abducted a BBC correspondent from his car in Gaza City on Monday. As he was being taken away, the journalist threw a business card on the street that identified him as Alan Johnston of BBC, Palestinian security officials said. Alan Johnston was born in Tanzania and educated in Scotland. He joined BBC World Service in 1991 and has spent eight of the last 16 years as a...

The Spanish High Court has decided to close a case in which the family of a cameraman killed in Iraq sought the arrest and questioning of three US soldiers, ruling that his death was a mistaken act of war, a Reuters report has said. JUSTICE DENIED: The Couso family. The court's decision was "outrageous and disgraceful'' and the family was going to appeal Friday's ruling, said Javier Couso, brother...

Over 1,000 news media personnel around the world have been killed trying to report the news in the past decade, with Iraq and Russia topping the list as the deadliest countries for the profession, according to a report released Tuesday. India stands sixth. The uncle (left) and father of Reuters journalist Waleed Khaled cry over his his body at Baghdad's Yarmouk hospital after he was shot in the...

Reporters Without Borders voiced scepticism today about a claim made by Chechnya’s acting President Ramzan Kadyrov at a news conference in Grozny on 20 February that Boris Berezovsky (a Russian businessman and former politician now living in exile in Britain) ordered the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. Kadyrov claimed that he was personally present...

A newspaper editor was shot dead by an unidentified man in the southern Philippines town of Mindanao this morning. Reports said Hernani Pastolero, 64, editor of the weekly paper Lightning Courier was sipping coffee in front of his house in Sultan Kudarat town on Mindanao island when gunmen shot him twice in the back of his head on Monday morning. Volunteers carry the body of Hernani Pastolero, 64...

The Chechnya prosecutor’s office is investigating officers of the southern republic’s Interior Ministry in connection with articles by the slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, according to the Moscow business daily Kommersant. The daily Wednesday quoted Chechnya prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov as saying that Politkovskaya’s accounts of alleged torture last spring prompted his office to...

Some police officials in Chechnya are under criminal investigation for a possible role in the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist, a New York-based news media rights group said here on Tuesday. The assertion, by the Committee to Protect Journalists, cast fresh attention on the possibility of an official role in a crime that was roundly condemned in the West, and drew a...

(RSF/IFEX) - RSF today welcomed the international warrant issued by a Madrid judge yesterday for the arrest of three US soldiers for the “murder” of Spanish cameraman José Couso of the privately-owned television station Telecinco, who was killed on 8 April 2003 when a US tank fired a shell at a Baghdad hotel used by the international media. “We hope that judge Santiago Pedraz’s decision to issue...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) supports calls from Australian affiliate, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (the Alliance), for full cooperation in an upcoming coroner's inquest into the deaths of five journalists, dubbed the Balibo five, who were killed in 1975 in the East Timorese town of Balibo while covering the Indonesian invasion. According to recent Australian...