sultan-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. 

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.

Continue reading Afghan journalists call for justice in Munadi's death »

On my first trip to Kabul for CPJ in July 2006, I met Sultan Mohammed Munadi at The New York Times bureau. Munadi, who was killed today, was working on a story when I walked in, but he took time to help me find a driver. 

We issued the following statement after Afghan journalist Sultan Mohammed Munadi was killed during a raid to free him and his colleague, New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell. The two journalists had been kidnapped in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz on Saturday...