Follow-up

Suspended IPS officer and the main accused on journalist Shivani Bhatnagar murder case, R K Sharma, on Tuesday claimed that the deceased scribe knew several top BJP leaders. He, however, downplayed his alleged intimate relationship with the Indian Express journalist, CNN-IBN has reported. Details: Hours after the Supreme Court rejected his plea, seeking certain ’statements’ recorded by the...

The Supreme Court has stayed an Assam government order cancelling accreditation to the North East Television (NETV) correspondents to cover the 33rd National Games in Guwahati which began Friday, news agencies reported. Soldiers use bomb detectors to check for explosives on a road in Guwahati, Monday, February 5, 2007. The rebel United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) withdrew its call for a...

Two French Muslim organisations are suing magazine Charlie Hebdo for printing cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed. The trial began in Paris today in a civil lawsuit by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France. Charlie Hebdo’s decision to reprint the Danish cartoons was taken at an especially fraught moment. Some 10 news media had been banned or suspended in...

Indonesian soldiers shot dead five Australia-based journalists even as they were surrendering at the town of Balibo in East Timor in 1975. An inquest into the death of one of the five Australia-based journalists, Brian Peters, began in Sydney on Monday, more than 30 years after his death on the then Indonesian-occupied island. An East Timorese eyewitness told a Sydney inquest Monday he saw four of...

Sudanese authorities have lifted the ban on independent Arabic daily Al-Sudani imposed on it after the newspaper violated a decree not to report on the case of a murdered journalist, Reuters has reported. The Al- Sudani newspaper, one of the leading dailies in Sudan, has had many problems with the authorities. Erwa's paper was closed down in Sudan under emergency law in 1994. It reopened last year...

The Associated Press has repeated its call for the US military to charge or release one of its freelance photographers whose been jailed in Iraq without charge since April last year. The news wire service said yesterday that Bilal Hussein is accused of being a “security threat” though it stressed no evidence has been produced to substantiate the claim since he was arrested 10 months ago. An...

The Associated Press has repeated its call for the US military to charge or release one of its freelance photographers whose been jailed in Iraq without charge since April last year. The news wire service said yesterday that Bilal Hussein is accused of being a “security threat” though it stressed no evidence has been produced to substantiate the claim since he was arrested 10 months ago. An...

The Chechnya prosecutor’s office is investigating officers of the southern republic’s Interior Ministry in connection with articles by the slain investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, according to the Moscow business daily Kommersant. The daily Wednesday quoted Chechnya prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov as saying that Politkovskaya’s accounts of alleged torture last spring prompted his office to...

Some police officials in Chechnya are under criminal investigation for a possible role in the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist, a New York-based news media rights group said here on Tuesday. The assertion, by the Committee to Protect Journalists, cast fresh attention on the possibility of an official role in a crime that was roundly condemned in the West, and drew a...

(RSF/IFEX) - RSF today welcomed the international warrant issued by a Madrid judge yesterday for the arrest of three US soldiers for the “murder” of Spanish cameraman José Couso of the privately-owned television station Telecinco, who was killed on 8 April 2003 when a US tank fired a shell at a Baghdad hotel used by the international media. “We hope that judge Santiago Pedraz’s decision to issue...