Case

An unidentified group of armed men abducted Aboubaker Al-Bizanti, a producer for Art Media Solutions (AMS), which produces local news coverage for the broadcaster Libya Al-Ahrar TV and other television stations, the night of August 7, 2016, and released him the following day, according to the journalist, his colleagues, and Libyan news websites.

A Cairo criminal court on July 18, 2016, sentenced Egyptian freelance photojournalist Belal Darder Mohamed to 15 years in prison in absentia on charges of participating in an unlicensed protest and membership in a terrorist organization, according to press reports. The charges were in connection with his work documenting a December 2014 protest by students…

On July 20, 2016, a group of lawyers chased and beat journalists gathered at a court complex in the southern Indian state of Kerala, injuring three people, according to The Indian Express and other Indian newspapers.

Nine armed agents of Nigeria’s Department of State Service, an elite police force, arrested Jones Abiri, the publisher of the Weekly Source tabloid newspaper, from his offices in Yenagoa, in the oil-rich southern Nigeria state of Bayelsa, on July 21, 2016, according to news reports. The operatives searched Abiri’s office and confiscated documents, the reports…

An Iranian court prosecutor suspended the Iranian reformist newspaper Ghanoon’s license following a legal complaint from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IGRC), the newspaper announced on June 20, 2016.

Two judges in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná ordered blogger Marcelo Auler to remove 10 articles from his website on the grounds that they offend police officers taking part in a federal investigation into corruption, Auler told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Police and officials from the Benue State Water Board detained Pius Iroja Angbo, a correspondent with the independent Channels Television, and cameraman Mike Umele, for roughly four hours on May 18, 2016, Angbo told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Qatari security forces on May 5, 2016, detained three journalists for the state-run Danish Broadcasting Corporation, one of the detained journalists, Niels Borchert Holm, told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Israel Defense Forces arrested photojournalist Hazem Naser on April 11, 2016 at a checkpoint near Nablus, a city in the West Bank, according to news reports. The Palestinian journalist was arrested for alleged Hamas-related activity, an Israeli security official told CPJ. As of May 17, 2016 no charges had been brought against Naser and his…

Ecuadoran news websites that published corruption allegations were the target of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on May 9, 2016, according to a joint letter Ecuadoran editors and press-freedom advocates sent to the Committee to Protect Journalists on May 13. In a DDoS attack, the attackers seek to overwhelm a website’s server with rapid,…