India

Police threatened to arrest two journalists based in Srinagar, capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, on July 10, 2009, for reporting that the family of a missing youth, Asrar Mushtaq Dar, feared he may have "disappeared" in police custody, according to a statement issued by the Kashmir Press Bureau. Dar was later found to have been murdered in a personal dispute with a friend, according to local news reports.

A group of political supporters attacked freelance photojournalist Jay Mandal at an election rally in Nandigram, West Bengal, India, on May 5, 2009, according to news reports and the New York-based South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA). 

Local police beat three photographers in two separate incidents on June 18, 2009, in India's West Bengal state. They were covering a government offensive by police and paramilitary forces trying to break a four-day siege of the Lalgarh area by Maoist insurgents, according to local news reports.

We issued this statement today in response to media reports that Anil Majumdar, the editor of daily Assamese newspaper Aji, was shot dead near his home in Guwahati on Tuesday evening. India placed 14 on CPJ's Impunity Index, released this week, for failing to prosecute journalist murders...

CPJ’s Impunity Index spotlights countries
where journalists are slain and killers go free

New York, March 23, 2009 -- The already murderous conditions for the press in Sri Lanka and Pakistan deteriorated further in the past year, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found in its newly updated Impunity Index, a list of countries where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes. Colombia, historically one of the world’s deadliest nations for the press, improved as the rate of murders declined and prosecutors won important recent convictions.

New York, February 13, 2009--Charges against the Calcutta-based editor and publisher of Indian newspaper The Statesman for republishing an article about religion from a British newspaper should be dropped, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. 

A series of coordinated terrorist attacks that struck more than a dozen locations in the commercial capital, Mumbai, killing more than 170 and wounding hundreds, shocked the world and punctuated a year of growing tension and risk. Witnesses became journalists as they Twittered up to 100 messages a minute, posted photos to Flickr, and transmitted cell-phone video to television networks, all of which provided a hectic yet compelling real-time account of the horrific three-day siege in late November. The instantaneous spread of information on the assault—which hit two lavish hotels, a top restaurant, a rail station, a Jewish center, and a hospital, among other sites—illustrated as much as any recent event the extraordinary revolution in media and communication.

New York, January 8, 2009--B.V. Seetaram and his wife, Rohini, who head the media group Chithra Publications in Karnataka state, southern India, have been in judicial custody since Sunday in connection with two-year old criminal charges relating to their newspapers, according to local news reports.

New York, December 18, 2008—For the sixth consecutive year, Iraq was the deadliest country in the world for the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists found in its end-of-year analysis. The 11 deaths recorded in Iraq in 2008, while a sharp drop from prior years, remained among the highest annual tolls in CPJ history.

New York, December 1, 2008--The Committee to Protect Journalists mourns the death of Hindu-language daily Hindustan correspondent Vikas Ranjan in the northern Indian state of Bihar on November 25.