One of the leaked US defence department cables released this week by WikiLeaks reveals details about Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s abduction and murder in Pakistan in January 2002 and the divisions it caused within Al-Qaeda. According to the cable, Al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks) told his interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay...
A federal appeals court in Philadelphia Tuesday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Afro-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been under sentence of death since 1982 for the fatal shooting of a policeman. The court gave the state of Pennsylvania six months to select a jury and hold the hearing, or otherwise agree to a life sentence. The ruling increases hopes that the almost 30 years that...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has urged police investigating the April 9 murder of radio and TV broadcaster Luciano Leitão Pedrosa in Vitória de Santo Antão (in the northeastern state of Pernambuco) not to rule out the possibility that it was connected to his work as a journalist. The organisation also called on the police to keep the public informed about their...
A 20-year statute of limitations will apply from this weekend to any criminal prosecution for the 1991 murders of El Espectador reporters Julio Daniel Chaparro and Jorge Enrique Torres, yet again highlighting the problem of impunity in Colombia. Chaparro and Torres were murdered on April 24, 1991 while investigating the impact of a 1988 paramilitary massacre in Segovia, in the northwestern...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has deplored Thailand Department of Special Investigation director-general Tharit Pengdit’s suggestion that the investigation into Japanese cameraman Hiroyuki Muramoto’s death could be "delegated" to his employer, the Reuters news agency. “By doing this, any witness to the crime might be daring enough to provide tip-offs to Reuters...
Côte d’Ivoire’s ambassador in Paris, Ally Coulibaly, has promised the family of vanished French-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer that “the whole truth” will be told about his disappearance in Abidjan seven years ago. The diplomat received Kieffer’s wife Osange Silou-Kieffer and daughter Canelle, in Paris Wednesday — along with Aline Richard, president of the Association Vérité pour Guy-André...
New York-based press freedom organisation Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has urged Burundi Justice Minister Ancilla Ntakaburimvo to intervene in the case of Jean-Claude Kavumbagu, editor of the news website NetPress who has been improperly imprisoned since July 17, 2010, on a charge of treason. In a letter to the minister, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon urged the state prosecutor to...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has lauded the investigation being conducted by the Karachi police into the murder of Geo News TV reporter Wali Khan Babar, who was gunned down on January 14, just minutes after submitting a report about two Karachi gangs. The police announced on April 7 that they arrested four suspects the previous day. “This is the first time in the...
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has welcomed movement in the case of the murder of Geo TV reporter Wali Khan Babar in Karachi, and called for a full prosecution to break a longstanding pattern of impunity in journalist murders in Pakistan. Police arrested five men they say carried out the killing in January. Police apprehended the men in a stolen vehicle in the town of Gulshan-e-Iqbal...
There are no longer any journalists in prison in Cuba. The last one was Albert Santiago Du Bouchet, who arrived in Spain Friday along with 36 other Cuban dissidents who were released on condition that they agree to go into exile, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The head of the independent Habana Press agency, Du Bouchet had been detained since April 18...
