Follow-up

Supporters of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who has been held without charge by U.S. officials in Iraq for 18 months, marked the year-and-a-half anniversary Friday by presenting an online petition with 1,500 signatures to several top federal officials, organizers said. In a letter faxed Friday to the White House, U.S. State Department, the Speaker of the House of Representatives...

Reporters Without Borders has greeted with relief the news that Riaz Mengal, a reporter with the newspaper "Intikhab", succeeded in escaping from kidnappers who abducted him on 4 October 2007 in the Khuzdar district of Baluchistan province. The journalist told a press conference in Quetta on 26 November, a day after his escape from his captors, that his "kidnapping was linked to articles about...

(RSF/IFEX) - Mahjoub Ourwa, the chairman of the independent Arabic-language daily "Al-Sudani", and Noureddine Medani, the newspaper's editor, were released on 29 November 2007 after spending 11 days in Omdurman prison, located north of Khartoum. The two journalists had been detained on 18 November for refusing to pay court-ordered fines of 10,000 Sudanese pounds (approx. 3,500 euros) each for...

(IPYS/IFEX) - On 28 November 2007, the police captured Nazario Coronel Ramírez, a.k.a. "Chamaya", the alleged perpetrator of the murder of journalist Miguel Pérez Julca, which took place in March 2007 in the city of Jaén, northeastern Peru. Coronel Ramírez was detained in Saposoa, a town in the province of Huallaga, San Martín region. After a week of surveillance, 10 policemen sent from Jaén...

Nov. 26, 2007 · The U.S. military continues to refuse to release any evidence against an AP photojournalist, even as they plan to bring criminal charges against him. The military first took Bilal Hussein, a member of the AP’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team, into custody in April of 2006 when Hussein provided shelter for several strangers after hearing an explosion on a nearby street in...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Bilal Hussein’s career as a photojournalist nearly ended soon after it began. Hussein, who had been working for The Associated Press for about three months, volunteered to stay in his native Fallujah as U.S. forces prepared to assault the city to drive out Sunni religious extremists. It was a decision not taken lightly. Once known as the “city of mosques,” Fallujah had become the...

The US military says it will recommend criminal charges against an Associated Press photographer detained in 2006 on suspicion of helping Iraqi insurgents. The Pentagon says additional evidence has come to light proving Bilal Hussein is a “terrorist media operative” who infiltrated the news agency. The case will be passed to Iraqi judges who will decide if he should be tried. AP says its own...

On October 7, 2006, after a six-month trial, the three hired assassins who killed Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a Filipino newspaper columnist and radio commentator who probed government corruption, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Marlene Garcia-Esperat was an accidental journalist. A chemist for the agriculture department on the southern island of Mindanao in the early 1990s, she was scrounging to...

An inquest report has established with great detail that the Indonesian army was responsible for the death of five British, Australian and New Zealander journalists in East Timor in 1975. The report clearly shows they were eliminated because they too much about Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, which was just getting under way. “The detailed and courageous inquest conducted by Dorelle Pinch

Yahoo shares plunged again Wednesday, a day after Congress hammered top executives over the company’s cooperation with Chinese officials in the jailing of a pro-democracy journalist. Shares slumped 7.7% as Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., renewed a call for Yahoo to endorse his bill banning such cooperation. Smith said he remained “absolutely bewildered and angered” that the beleaguered Internet portal...