Dear Secretary Rumsfeld: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is encouraged that the administration is making efforts to accommodate journalists who are seeking to cover a possible U.S. military action in the Gulf. We welcome the Pentagon’s plan to embed as many as 500 journalists with U.S. forces as a positive step that will improve…
New York, March 6, 2003—Armenian police yesterday arrested six suspects in the December 2002 murder of Tigran Nagdalian, the 36-year-old head of the state-owned Armenian Public Television. The police continue to look for other individuals linked to the crime. Law enforcement authorities have not released the suspects’ names or details of the crime, including the…
New York, March 6, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is concerned about two Palestinian journalists injured in Gaza this morning during an Israeli army raid into the Jabalya refugee camp. Reuters Jerusalem bureau chief Tim Heritage told CPJ that cameraman Shams Odeh and photographer Ahmad Jadallah were both injured by shrapnel caused by an…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is extremely concerned about an official warning issued by the Russian Media Ministry on Wednesday, February 26, to the Moscow-based communist, ultra-nationalist weekly Zavtra. This warning, which followed the publication of an interview with exiled Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, is the latest in the Russian government’s…
New York, March 5, 2003—A suspect accused of issuing death threats against Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent with the Moscow-based twice weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was cleared of the criminal charge against him yesterday. Politkovskaya is well known in Russia for her investigative reports on human rights abuses committed by the Russian military in Chechnya. The…
Your Majesty: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned by your government’s importation ban on the Times of Tonga (Taimi ‘o Tonga), an independent, biweekly newspaper published in New Zealand. On February 27, the Times of Tonga offices in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, and Auckland, New Zealand, received a letter signed by the Tongan minister…
New York, March 3, 2003—A bomb destroyed the vehicle of Nino Pavic, an influential independent newspaper publisher, on the morning of Saturday, March 1, in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. According to local and international press reports, the 50-year-old publisher and his family were sleeping in their home in the affluent suburb of Tuskanac when a bomb…