Harassed

The 66-year-old editor of the daily al-Ayyam, Hisham Bashraheel, was arrested on January 6, the day after the security forces lifted a 24-hour siege of his newspaper in Aden, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. One of his sons, managing editor, Hani Bashraheel, was also arrested at the same time. Another son of Hisham Bashraheel, Mohammed Hisham Bashraheel, was arrested on January 5. It...

Unidentified intruders broke into the offices of the Riga-based daily Neatkariga Rita Avize and its publishing house SIA Mediju Nams on the night of January 1 in which windows were broken, the offices of editors and leading reporters were badly damaged, and many files were destroyed or defaced, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “They tried to make us think it was an ordinary burglary...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned Yemen’s attempt to use the current anti-terror push to crush human rights after security forces today fired on a crowd of protestors staging a ‘sit-in’ outside the offices of a banned newspaper. “The Ali Abdallah Saleh government is taking advantage of support from foreign powers in the fight against terrorism on its soil to deliberately violate people...

This has been a grim year for Yemen’s independent press, the victim of an media war waged by the government under the guise of combating terrorism and sedition, and the situation could get even worse in 2010, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said Thursday, following the arrests of two more journalists in the past four days. The first of the past week’s media arrests was that of Khalid Jahafi, a...

A Yemeni reporter is being held without charge after being arrested on Sunday while covering clashes between security forces and separatists in Yemen’s southern province of Dhala, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local news reports. The arrest is the latest attempt by the government to silence media outlets and journalists covering civil unrest in the...

The decision to jail a blogger and an Internet café owner is an escalation in Morocco’s already intense campaign against journalists and bloggers, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Friday. CPJ called on Moroccan authorities to overturn both prison sentences on appeal. Blogger Bashir Hazzam, 26, was sentenced to four months in prison for “spreading false information...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the behaviour of the authorities in the southwestern province of Balochistan in letting seven days go by before admitting that they were holding Rehmatullah Shaheen, a reporter for the Baloch nationalist newspaper Daily Tawar in Bolan District. Shaheen was reported missing on December 8 but it was only after a wave of protests that the local...

There has been a tit-for-tat arrests of journalists by Palestinian political rivals Hamas and Fatah of late, each side carrying out an arrest in response to an arrest by the other faction, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The latest victim is Mohammed Eshtawi, the head of pro-Hamas satellite TV station Al-Aqsa’s operations in the West Bank, who was arrested by the Palestinian...

The West Bank-based Palestinian Authorities have detained since Monday even as the Hamas-led government in Gaza continued harassing journalists, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Mohamed Eshtewi, Al-Aqsa television bureau chief in the West Bank, was arrested on Monday near a supermarket in the city of Tulkarem following two days of intermittent police...

There has been an unrelenting wave of unsolved attacks on journalists in Kyrgyzstan, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In two separate cases on Tuesday, a journalist was beaten and a newspaper received a bullet in an envelope along with threatening notes, according to local news reports. Last week, several other journalists and political analysts who...