Harassed

The Zimbabwean government had asked officials to spy on the emails of editors employed by the state-owned Zimpapers group from August 3-15 this year to gauge their loyal to President Robert Mugabe, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “As a result of this illegal decision, editor Bhekinkosi Ncube of the magazine Umthunywa has been suspended for nearly two months and could lose his job...

Jonathan Elendu, publisher of online newspaper Elendu Reports (elendureports.com), has been detained in Nigeria since October 17, when he was arrested by the State Security Service (SSS) on arrival at Nnamdi Azikiwe international airport, in the capital Abuja, on a flight from the United States, where he lives. Denying that Elendu had been arrested, SSS spokesman Kenechuks Onyegogu said he had...

Four Azeri journalists have been held without charge for more than 10 days, possibly in Tehran's Evin prison, while an Azeri journalist and blogger was sentenced to six months in prison on September 20 for her online articles, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. "These Azeris join the list of ethnic minority journalists held in Iran's prisons for criticising social inequality and...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over Russia's denial of entry to a British journalist into the country last week. Freelance journalist Simon Pirani had a valid, multiple-entry visa to Russia when he was stopped by border guards at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on June 17. Officials handed him a “declaration of return,” which stated that he could not enter the country...

Ossayd Amarneh, a cameraman employed by Al-Aqsa TV, the mouthpiece of the Islamic party Hamas, was arrested in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on September 21, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). It is the fourth time Amarneh has been arrested in the past 12 months. The Palestinian Authority security services constant harass Al-Aqsa journalists in order to rein in Hamas’s propaganda and...

Australian federal police raided the house of a Canberra journalist Tuesday seeking to identify the source for a story quoting classified material from the top-secret Defence Intelligence Organisation, the Age has reported. Seven officers searched the home of Canberra Times national affairs correspondent Philip Dorling at 8.30 am. They took Dorling's laptop computer, the hard drive from a second...

A journalist has been arrested in Somaliland following a complaint by the Somali Red Crescent over a news report on SRC's food distribution that the journalist published on the Internet. In The journalist, Abdiqani Ismail Goh of Radio Las Anod, had cited residents protesting how the food was distributed. The arrest of the journalist on September 17 was ordered by head of Somaliland police division...

The Sangrah Police in Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh on Sunday raided the office of a local daily on the basis of a telephone call from an unidentified person, the Indian Express has reported. The District Journalists’ Association, under the leadership of their president SP Jerath, Monday submitted a representation to Sirmour Deputy Commissioner Pushpinder Rajput to be sent to Chief...

South Ossetian and Russian authorities should immediately release three members of a Polish television crew detained today near the village of Karaleti in the buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. Authorities confiscated equipment and cellphones from the Telewizja Polska (TVP) crew and were holding the three members incommunicado in the...

Authorities must thoroughly investigate the murder in Dagestan of Telman Alishayev, a reporter and host for the Islamic television channel TV-Chirkei, and the severe attack in Kabardino-Balkariya against Miloslav Bitokov, editor-in-chief of the independent weekly Gazeta Yuga, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Alishayev died Wednesday gunshot wounds suffered in an attack on...