Khawar Shafiq, the Daily Waqt (Daily Time) correspondent in Faisalabad, told colleagues he managed to escape from abductors on April 11, 2009, four days three bearded men grabbed him by his home near Faisalabad and shoved him into a car. He said the men made him inhale fumes from a liquid that made him lose…
On the evening of April 12, 2009, Raphael Ramírez, editor of the national daily La Prensa, received two anonymous calls at his home in La Paz from an individual who threatened to kill him if he “did not stop publishing lies,” Carlos Morales, the daily’s director, told CPJ. The following morning, an unidentified individual called…
José Luis Ortega Vidal, 42, editorial director of the daily Notisur in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz was severely injured after falling off a staircase on the morning of March 3, 2009. He was attempting to flee from a former official who was threatening him and other journalists with a gun, according to witnesses…
Park Dae-sung, who blogs under the name Minerva, was acquitted of charges in South Korea on April 20, 2009, under a rarely used law of “spreading false information with the intent of harming the public interest.” The Seoul court that heard his case ruled that Park wrote without malicious intent, even if his articles were…
The office of Uthayan, a Tamil-language daily, in Jaffna was hit with an explosive device around 11 p.m. on March 24, 2009. Most Sri Lankan media reports identified the weapon as a hand grenade. It was the fifth time in three years that the office had been attacked.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court reversed its own 2007 ruling on April 16, 2009, and dismissed a $106 million case against the Hong Kong-based Time Warner publication that had been filed by the country’s late President Suharto and continued by his heirs.
A high court judge in Singapore ruled on March 19, 2009, that Melanie Kirkpatrick, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, was in contempt of court for two articles and a letter to the editor published by the Dow Jones-owned Wall Street Journal Asia last year, according to international news reports. Kirkpatrick was…
On March 28, 2009, several gunshots were fired at the home of Juan Antonio Zavala Hernández, publisher of the weekly newspaper Mi Ciudad in the town of Romita in central Guanajuato state. There were no injuries, the journalist told CPJ. Zavala, who said he has been repeatedly threatened by the local mayor, said he believes…
Two individuals, who identified themselves as members of the far-right paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), shot Colombian journalist Gustavo Adolfo Valencia Ayala inside his home in the eastern city of Popayán on March 16, 2009, according to local news reports. The journalist, who was injured but is in stable condition, said he…
On December 30, 2008, a spokesman for the Iranian Judiciary confirmed in a press conference in Tehran that Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger, had been detained since November 2008, in connection with comments he allegedly made about a key cleric, according to local and international news reports.