Follow-up

Syrian reporter Ali Taha was freed on February 7 after 36 days in detention, and cameraman Ali Ahmed a few days later, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The two journalists, who work for the TV station Rotana, were arrested on January 2. “The release of these two journalists is good news, but we condemn that the fact that they were held for a more than month without charge,” Paris...

Eritrean journalist and essayist Yirgalem Fisseha Mebrahtu has been held in solitary confinement for the past few weeks in May Srwa prisons, to the north of Asmara, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. It is not known why she is being given this treatment. Employed by Asmara-based Radio Bana, Yirgalem Fisseha was arrested when the authorities raided the station on February 22, 2009 and...

The Salvadorean police have arrested three more suspects in the investigation into documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda’s murder on September 2, 2009, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Their arrests bring the total number of suspects detained to 28. The police say they think a total of 36 people had a part in the killing of Poveda, who had French and Spanish dual citizenship. The...

Simon Hervé Nko’o and Serge Sabouang, two journalists who were arrested by members of the General Directorate for External Investigation (DGRE) on February 5 without any reason being given, were finally released on the evening of February 12, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF).

Luis Valdez Villacorta, the former mayor of Pucallpa (the capital of the east-central region of Ucayali), has been acquitted for the second time of masterminding the murder of radio Frecuencia Oriental journalist Alberto Rivera Fernández in Pucallpa on April 21, 2004, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Valdez was acquitted on February 8 by a Lima criminal court at the end of a...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) on Thursday expressed shock at the conditions in which the trial of the alleged killers of Hrant Dink was being held after attending the 12th hearing in the case on February 8. Dink, a Turkish journalist of Armenian origin, was shot dead in Istanbul on January 19, 2007. He was the editor of the bi-lingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos and a critic of Turkey’s...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has voiced relief at the release Wednesday of photographer Umida Akhmedova but expressed dismayed at the “extremely dangerous precedent” set by the Tashkent court which found her guilty of “slander” and “insulting the Uzbek people”. The court convicted her only two days into her trial but immediately released her on the grounds that she was eligible under an amnesty...

A court court in the Almaty district of Medeu rescinded the order it issued a week earlier banning all of the Kazakh media from publishing any information that could damage the reputation of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, businessman Timur Kulibayev. The Medeu district court issued the ban on February 1 in response to the legal action which Kulibayev brought against four independent...

Iraqi photographer, Ibrahim Jassam, of Reuters, who had been held by the US military since his arrest on September 1, 2008, was released Wednesday. Jassam was arrested by the US military in Mahmudiyah, 30 km south of Baghdad, and was held at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport. Iraq’s central criminal court on November 30, 2008 said he had no case to answer and must be released, but the US army...

A life sentence has been passed on hitman Madix Maulana for the 2005 murder of radio journalist Edgar Amoro in Pagadian, on the southern island of Mindanao. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) regards it as an “encouraging sign” but believes the case should not be closed until the masterminds and accomplices have been identified and brought to trial. In a written message to RSF after sentencing, Amoro...