Follow-up

Russia's top investigator, Aleksandr Bastrykin, has ordered the reopening of a probe into a near-lethal November 2008 attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda. Bastrykin's order on Thursday comes a day after a court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki convicted Beketov of criminally slandering local mayor Vladimir Strelchenko. The conviction, coming at a time...

Radio journalist Abdifatah Jama, who was imprisoned in August for airing an interview with an Islamist rebel leader in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, has been given a presidential pardon and released, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Jama, deputy director of Horseed Media, had begun serving a six-year prison sentence after being convicted on treason...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reiterated its call for the release of Hojatullah Mujadadi, the only journalist detained in Afghanistan. According to the latest information it has obtained, Mujadadi’s arrest by the National Directorate of Security was based on a confession extracted by force from a young man identified as Veiss, an opponent of former Kapisa...

During the 15th hearing Monday in the trial in Istanbul of newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s alleged killers, the court rejected the Dink family’s request for the murder to be reenacted in the presence of alleged hitman Ogün Samast at the spot where Dink was gunned down, outside the office of his Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in the Istanbul district of Sisli. In a surprise development, the court...

On the first day of his trial Monday before a state security court, journalist Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae challenged the court’s legality and said those responsible for his abduction and forced disappearance should also be on trial, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). His lawyers, Abdel Rahman Barman and Khaled Al-Anssi, attended the hearing as observers and...

CBS radio in Uganda resumed normal broadcasting at 9:30 a.m. on October 23 after being closed for a year. Its return to the air turns the page on the government’s closure of four radio stations amid rioting in Kampala in September 2009, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. The press freedom organization nonetheless remains concerned about the climate for the...

Preposterous charges have been brought against the Sabaa news agency reporter Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae, whose trial before a special state security court is due to start Monday, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). A specialist in covering Al-Qaeda, Shae has been charged by the attorney-general with inciting the murder of the president and his son, “belonging...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over the health of imprisoned Tunisian journalist Fahem Boukadous. It has called upon the Tunisian government to release him immediately. Boukadous, who suffers from acute asthma, started a hunger strike on October 8 to protest the conditions of his detention at Gafsa prison, about 229 miles (369 km) southwest of Tunis. According to...

On the 10th anniversary of Tamil journalist Mayilvaganam Nimalarajan’s murder in the northern city of Jaffna, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reiterated its hope that the Sri Lankan government will finally relaunch the police investigation into his death. The Jaffna correspondent of the BBC’s Tamil and Sinhalese-language services and the Sri Lankan newspapers...

Cuban journalist Alfredo Felipe Fuentes, left, was freed from prison on Friday and exiled to Spain as part of a July agreement between the Havana government and the Catholic Church. Seventeen journalists jailed in the 2003 Black Spring crackdown have now been freed and exiled as part of the agreement. "I feel as if I was born again, trying to get used to cell phones, personal computers and emails...