Harassed

Singapore released on bail Tuesday a British author arrested two days earlier as part of a criminal defamation investigation related to his book on the city-state's death penalty policy. Alan Shadrake, a 75-year old freelance journalist, posted $10,000 Singapore dollars ($7,250) bail, said his lawyer, M Ravi. Police confiscated Shadrake's passport, interrogated him about the book and will question...

Burundi police arrested a journalist for alleged "treason" Saturday over an article questioning whether the security forces could deal with an attack like one that hit Uganda a week ago, an official said, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). The July 11 bombings in Kampala claimed by Al Qaeda-inspired rebels killed at least 73 people watching the World Cup final in what the insurgents said was...

Press freedom groups have condemned the Malaysian government’s decision to suspend the distribution of three opposition newspapers – Suara Keadilan, Kabar Era Pakatan and Rocket – since June 30 and restrict the distribution of a fourth, Harakah, since Thursday. “This is the second time since Prime Minister Najib Razak’s election in 2008 that the opposition press has been subjected to this kind of...

Dauda Mohammed, a newspaper photographer in Ghana who was reportedly abducted on July 12 by unidentified men for taking pictures of a private mansion of former president Jerry John Rawlings, reportedly escaped from his abductors, after about an hour in detention, according to the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA). Mohammed, a reporter for the privately-owned newspaper The Insight, told Accra...

Tunisian authorities have arrested Fahem Boukadous, a correspondent for the satellite television station Al-Hiwar al-Tunisi. The police arrested Boukadous Thursday at Farhat Hached Hospital in Sousse. The journalist had been discharged Wednesday after being treated for respiratory problems, according to news reports. His wife told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that he...

Three journalists have been detained in Ivory Coast since Tuesday, after they refused to disclose sources for an investigative report detailing the results of a government probe into corruption in the coffee and cocoa export trade, according to local journalists and news reports. Ivorian State Prosecutor Raymond Tchimou, who summoned staffers from the private daily Le Nouveau Courrier—Managing...

A raid was carried on the newsroom of the independent Uzbek-language broadcaster Osh TV in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh on Friday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The Kyrgyz security service (known as SNB) also temporarily detained director Khalil Khudaiberdiyev in the raid on the station. Osh TV is currently off the air, the Uzbek service of the US government-funded...

Turkmen authorities have refused to allow husband-and-wife journalists Annamamed Myatiyev and Elena Myatiyeva to travel to the Netherlands, where Myatiyev needs to undergo an operation for a detached retina, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). They were prevented from flying on June 28. Myatiyev and his wife were told they were banned from leaving the country when they tried to fly from...

Police in Rwanda arrested the editor of a private newspaper on Thursday last in connection with a series of articles critical of the government, according to local journalists. Agnès Uwimana was taken into custody in the capital, Kigali, over allegations that her Kinyarwanda-language weekly Umurabyo had published stories “inciting the public to disobey,” “articles related to division and ethnicity...

Ramazan Yesergepov, the ailing imprisoned editor of the now-defunct independent newspaper Alma-Ata Info, is on a hunger-strike for the third consecutive day on Thursday in a penal colony in the southern Kazakh city of Taraz, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On June 25, Yesergepov announced his decision to go on hunger strike starting July 6 to protest his...