Follow-up

The Press Council of India has initiated suo motu action in the arrest of two journalists of a vernacular newspaper in Andhra Pradesh, the Press Trust of India has reported. In a letter to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy, the media body said that the incident prima facie appears to pose threats to the free functioning of the Press. "As the statue of the Press Council statute...

Despite the arrest of a suspect in the murder of New Zealand photojournalist Trent Keegan, questions about the killing remain unanswered, New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Thursday. Kenyan police are holding a suspect in Keegan's murder, a Kenyan police spokesman told CPJ. The police have not released details, but spokesman Eric Kiraithe told CPJ that police have not found...

The arrests of Andhra Jyothi editor K Srinivas and two reporters of the daily has evoked strong reactionsfrom the media and political parties alike in Andhra Pradesh, says a report in the Hindu. Srinivas and the two journalists were produced before the III Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate well past Tuesday midnight and remanded to 15-day judicial custody. They were shifted to the...

A Hyderabad court Thursday granted bail to the Editor and two other journalists of Telugu daily Andhra Jyothi who were arrested for allegedly hurling casteist remarks at a Dalit leader. While Editor K Srinivas was granted unconditional bail, the reporters M Vamsi Krishna and T Srinivas were given conditional bail and asked to report to Jubilee Hills police station once a week. After hearing the...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has welcomed the "transparency" of a US Defence Department report released on June 16 confirming that US soldiers were responsible for the fatal shooting of Reuters soundman Waleed Khaled in Baghdad on August 28, 2005. Khaled drove with Reuters cameraman Haider Kadhem to the Baghdad district of Al-Adil to cover a situation in which an Iraqi police unit had been...

British journalist Sean Langan has been released after being abducted and held in Afghanistan for three months by a group associated with the Taliban, the Press Associaiton (PA) has reported. The freelance reporter was working for the Channel 4 programme Dispatches when he was abducted on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some details: A spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has deplored the Niamey public prosecutor's decision to file an immediate appeal against an investigating judge's June 23 decision to allow detained journalist Moussa Kaka to be released provisionally. The appeal blocked the release of Kaka, who continues to be held in a Niamey prison. The director of privately-owned Radio Saraounia and the Niger correspondent of...

Authoritarian regimes around the world are dealing with troublesome citizen bloggers by arresting them, and they're doing it more often. "Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big," says Phil

Twenty-nine global media organisations have appealed to the United Nations to put pressure on Sri Lanka to protect journalists, who have been described as "enemies of the state" for being critical of the government's role in the civil war in the country. The media organisations affiliated to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon that...

A judge in Niger ordered the conditional release of a reporter for Radio France International (RFI) on Monday, but he stayed in jail because the public prosecutor lodged an appeal, a judicial source and RFI said, according to Reuters. Moussa Kaka, director of a private radio station and correspondent for French state-owned RFI, will stay in jail until an appeal court rules on his case. Kaka was...