Top Developments • Two killed, but press fatalities don’t rise in proportion to overall dangers. • Kidnappings an ongoing hazard; two French journalists held captive. Key Statistic 13: Foreign journalists killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S. invasion. Journalists faced numerous challenges from a multifaceted war, instances of government censorship, a culture of official corruption,…
New York, January 19, 2011–The Committee to Protect Journalists is greatly concerned about the acid attack on Afghan journalist and author Razaq Mamoon, which left him disfigured. Local and international media reports say Mamoon was attacked as he was walking outside his apartment in Kabul on Tuesday evening.
New York Times photojournalist Joao Silva lost both his legs when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine in Afghanistan on October 23. “Those of you who know João will not be surprised to learn that throughout this ordeal he continued to shoot pictures,” wrote New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller in a memo to…
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.
Until recently, Afghanistan’s Internet has been notably free of government censorship. That stems largely from the limited impact and visibility of the Net domestically: The Taliban banned the Internet during its rule, and despite a recent boom in use, the nation has only a million users out of a population of about 29 million. But…