Sultan Mohammed Munadi

This morning, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that British aid worker Linda Norgrove, who died in a rescue attempt after she was taken hostage in Afghanistan, may have been killed by a U.S. grenade rather than by her Taliban captors, as originally reported.

New York January 11, 2010—The death of U.K.-based Sunday Mirror reporter Rupert Hamer, who was killed in an explosion outside a village in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, is an indicator of the rising danger for journalists in Afghanistan. The explosion also wounded Hamer’s colleague photographer Philip Coburn and took the life of a U.S. Marine.

News from the Committee to Protect Journalists

New York, November 12, 2009—A Norwegian freelance journalist and an Afghan colleague were released Thursday after nearly a week in captivity in eastern Afghanistan, according to international news reports.

A large group of Afghan journalists met on Sunday in Kabul. They were angry about the death of New York Times journalist Sultan Mohammed Munadi in the September 9 British-led rescue attempt to free him and Times’ reporter Stephen Farrell, who survived unharmed, from kidnappers. After the meeting, they sent me a list of demands and a pdf of their signatures  on a statement they first wrote in Dari and then translated into English. The group also sent along a biography of Munadi.

Munadi and Times colleague Stephen Farrell were kidnapped by the Taliban on September 5. Munadi was shot four days later during a British military rescue mission that freed Farrell, a British-Irish national. Farrell told the Times he did not know the source of fire that killed the Afghan journalist. The Times reported that the British decision to attempt the rescue came after Afghan government agents learned that the captors were planning to move the journalists into Pakistan.

The two men were abducted while covering the aftermath of a NATO raid on two hijacked fuel tankers near Kunduz in which scores of Afghan civilians were reportedly killed. Munadi was a well-respected Afghan reporter who had just returned to the country for the presidential election held in August. He had been studying in Germany for a master’s degree in public policy and had been a long-time reporter for the Times and other publications.

Farrell said the two were given food, water, and blankets, and were not harmed while they were being held. But he said that Munadi was taunted by the kidnappers, who told him to remember the case of Ajmal Naqshbandi, an Afghan reporter who was beheaded after being taken by the Taliban in Helmand province in 2007. 

Munadi’s remains were not recovered by the British rescue team. British military authorities released few details about the mission and did not respond to inquiries from CPJ seeking information about the circumstances of his death, whether his rescue was an objective of the mission, or whether the troops had sufficient information to identify him as one of the captives.

Anger among Afghan journalists rose in the days after Munadi’s death. On September 13, many of his colleagues signed a letter calling on the Afghan government to undertake “serious and thorough investigations to identify the perpetrators of this inhumane act.”

In November, CPJ called on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to undertake a thorough investigation into the rescue mission, noting that many questions were left unanswered in the aftermath.