State Impunity

A special five-judge panel named by the Philippines Court of Appeal in Manila may free the suspected mastermind behind the Maguindanao massacre, or release him on a technicality. Lawyers for Zaldy Ampatuan, the former governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, have entered a plea for the charges against their client to be dropped, according to New York-based Press freedom group...

Russian investigators have pledged to re-open investigations into the cases of five murdered journalists. Valery Ivanov, Natalia Skryl, Aleksei Sidorov, Yuri Shchekochikhin and Vagif Kochetkov were all killed—or are suspected to have been killed—in connection with their journalistic activities. They are all Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of PEN International cases from the last nine years...

Ukrainian authorities are threatening to upend progress in the 10-year-old investigation into the September 2000 abduction and murder of independent journalist Georgy Gongadze, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The Kyiv Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled to reject a second appeal by Myroslava Gongadze, the journalist's widow, against the...

Marcel Legré, a machine operator at La Refondation Printing Press, printers of Notre Voie, a pro-Gbagbo newspaper, was in the afternoon of February 28 violently killed by alleged pro-Ouattara militants during an armed confrontation in the town of Koumassi, in the centre of the country. The Media Foundation for West Africa's (MFWA) correspondent reported that machete-wielding militants from the...

An Iraqi journalist reporting for the satellite television station al-Ittijah, whose name remains unknown, was among those killed Thursday in a blast that targeted a celebration in the city of Ramadi, Aswat al Iraq news agency reported Monday. The killing occurred only a week after another Iraqi journalist was shot dead in Mosul by a group of unidentified armed men, confirming Iraq as one of the...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over inconsistencies in Thailand's official investigation into the killing of Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto, who was killed by gunfire while covering clashes between anti-government protesters and security forces last April 10 in Bangkok. Thailand's Department of Special Investigation told reporters Monday that its investigations...

Thailand's Department of Special Investigation (DSI) has concluded that Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto, who was killed during political protests last year, was not shot by security forces, the head of the DSI said Sunday. That conclusion contradicts a preliminary finding in a DSI report leaked to Reuters in December, which indicated the bullet that killed the Japanese journalist on April 10 came...

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) in calling for an investigation into the drive-by shooting death of Abdost Rind, a 27-year-old part-time journalist in the Turbat area of Balochistan province in Pakistan's southwest on February 18. According to the PFUJ and local media reports, Rind—a reporter with the Daily Eagle, an Urdu-language...

There were physical attacks on seven journalists in two separate incidents during Tuesday’s municipal and district elections as well as the attacks on two other journalists during February 18’s general election, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “The violence against journalists during these two elections reached alarming proportions and seems to have...

An armed raid was carried out Wednesday morning on the Baghdad headquarters of the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), partner organisation of Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) in Iraq, in which all of the JFO’s computers and archives were stolen “A dozen gunmen belonging to private security forces burst into our office near Al-Fardous Square in central Baghdad...