Al-Qaeda

A French freelance reporter has said she was expelled from the city of Gao after reporting on allegations of human rights abuses in a nearby town, according to news reports.

The Italian Foreign Minister announced in a statement on April 13, 2013, that four Italian journalists abducted in northern Syria on April 4, 2013, had been released. News accounts reported that the journalists were believed to have been held for more than a week by the rebel group, Jabhat Al-Nusra, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, but the foreign ministry did not immediately confirm the information.

The international community, deep in donor fatigue, withdraws media funding. By Bob Dietz

Few cases better underscore the need for digital security among journalists. On Tuesday, ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou pleaded guilty to leaking the identity of another CIA operative to Matthew Cole, a journalist formerly with an ABC News investigative team. In a 2007 interview with ABC, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to confirm that waterboarding had been used on Al-Qaeda suspects.

Members of Ansar Dine, a Salafist militant group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, shut down two local radio stations on March 27, 2012, as they seized the northeast town of Kidal from the Malian army, according to local journalists.

Militants belonging to the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a Salafist group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, seized control of community station Radio Soni in the northeastern town of Ansongo on August 29, 2012, according to local journalists.

Two officials of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a Salafist militant group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, raided the studios of Radio Annya in the northeastern town of Gao on August 20, 2012, according to the BBC.

On May 21 this year, a military court convicted three Pakistani naval officers of negligence and dereliction of duty for their actions during an attack on the main naval airbase in the heart of Karachi on May 22, 2011. After the incident had ended, the military said 10 security guards were killed, two aircraft were blown up, and the four men who carried out the attack were shot or blew themselves up after they had held out for 16 hours on the Mehran Naval Base.

Perhaps the best insider details about the raid came from Saleem Shahzad, a political reporter for Asia Online, in his article, "Al-Qaeda had warned of Pakistani strike," that ran two days before his abduction on May 29, 2011. He had written in the past about militant groups and the military, with a book, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, released just weeks before his murder. In his last article, he wrote about the Mehran events, reporting that armed forces personnel sympathetic to Al-Qaeda had helped coordinate the attack. On May 31 last year, his body was found floating face-down in an irrigation ditch.

New York, February 15, 2012--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the health of imprisoned Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Hider Shaea who has waged a hunger strike since Sunday to protest his continued detention.