2012

Police in Dakar, the capital, summoned Alassane Samba Diop, director of Radio Futurs Médias (RFM), for four hours of questioning on August 25, 2012, over an interview he broadcast the night before with the leader of a hardline Islamist group, according to news reports.

On August 13, 2012, unidentified passengers illegally sitting on and hanging from rail cars of a moving train in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, assaulted two photojournalists for taking pictures of them from a pedestrian bridge, according to news reports. 

Two journalists of the pro-government TV station Al-Ikhbariya and their driver who were kidnapped on August 10, 2012, were freed by the Syrian army six days later, according to the state news agency SANA.

A group of armed men attacked the office of the local branch of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the southern city of Warri on August 7, 2012, according to news reports. The men came with kegs of gasoline and threatened to lynch journalists and burn the office if they were not granted media…

Colombian journalist Élida Parra Alonso, who was kidnapped on July 24, 2012, by a local guerrilla group in the northeastern state of Arauca, was released on August 13, 2012, according to news reports. Parra hosts a program for Sarare Estéreo radio station and does community outreach work for Oleoducto Bicentenario, a company constructing an oil…

About 30 trucks from Transcaribe Trading (TCT), a local construction company in Panama City, surrounded the offices of the daily La Prensa on August 2, 2012, from around 10 p.m. until 1:30 a.m., preventing the paper’s trucks and employees from leaving the premises, according to news reports. TCT workers told local journalists that they were…

A journalist in the northern breakaway republic of Somaliland was attacked by police while covering a child custody dispute in a local court on August 4, 2012, according to local journalists and news reports. 

Radio Gbafth, an independent community radio station in Tonkolili district, was attacked by supporters of a local politician on July 19, 2012, according to local journalists and the Media Foundation of West Africa, a Ghana-based press freedom organization. The politician, John Raka Conteh, also known as Potas, had been invited as a panelist on one…

Two Tunisian journalists working for a local TV station were attacked by police officers on July 23, 2012, as they reported on the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, according to news reports.

Prominent Mexican journalist Sanjuana Martínez was arrested on July 5, 2012, in the state of Nuevo León under unclear circumstances related to a civil custody dispute, and was released from jail the following day, according to news reports. Martínez was detained by armed police, which is unusual in a civil case, the reports said.