New York, September 30, 2003—Hiramon Mondol, a local correspondent for the daily Dainik Prabarttan, was released from jail and exonerated from extortion charges on September 20 by the Magistrate of the Special Tribunal Act in Khulna, a town in southwestern Bangladesh, according to local news reports. Police and security forces brutally attacked Mondol with hockey…
New York, September 29, 2003—Police detained three journalists today from Kenya’s oldest daily newspaper, the East African Standard, which is based in the capital, Nairobi. Managing Director Tom Mshindi, Associate Editor Kwamchetsi Makokha, and Sunday editor David Makali reported to the police at around 1:00 p.m. after receiving a summons. According to Mshindi, the police…
New York, September 26, 2003—Police in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, yesterday charged nine journalists from the Daily News with violating Section 83 of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) by practicing journalism without accreditation. The journalists, who were summoned to the Harare central police station yesterday morning, were on a list of…
New York, September 26, 2003—At a closed hearing yesterday, the City Court in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, rejected an appeal by jailed journalist and human rights activist Ruslan Sharipov to have his conviction and prison sentence overturned, according to local and international press reports. Instead, the court dropped one of the three charges against Sharipov and…
New York, September 26, 2003—The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation has decided to hold a hearing on October 13 examining the constitutionality of legal amendments that recently strengthened state regulation over independent media outlets, particularly their coverage of election campaigns. The independent Moscow-based radio station Ekho Moskvy and the reformist Union of Right Forces…
New York, September 25, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply troubled that Jordanian authorities banned the September 23 issue of the private weekly Al-Wihda. According Mowaffaq Mahadeen, a managing editor at Al-Wihda, and independent sources in the capital, Amman, the general prosecutor of the State Security Court ordered the ban.
September 25, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly condemns a bomb attack on a Baghdad hotel this morning, in which a journalist from the U.S. network NBC was injured. The attack may have been aimed specifically at NBC’s Baghdad bureau, whose journalists were the hotel’s only residents, according to the network. NBC News reported…
New York, September 25, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) will honor four journalists—from Afghanistan, Russia, Morocco, and Cuba—with the 2003 International Press Freedom Awards in November. Abdul Samay Hamed (Afghanistan), Aboubakr Jamai (Morocco), Musa Muradov (Russia), and Manuel Vázquez Portal (Cuba) have suffered serious reprisals for daring to report with independence and authority in…
New York, September 24, 2003—Investigators from the Moscow Prosecutor General’s Office searched the office of the Moscow-based independent news Web site Grani.ru on Friday, September 19. Investigators said they wanted an original copy of an anonymous e-mail that Grani.ru had received on August 18 containing a video recording of two prosecutors working for the pro-Russian…