On April 24, 2009, journalist El Malick Seck, who was serving a three-year prison sentence over an editorial implicating President Abdoulaye Wade and his son in an alleged money laundering scandal, was released on presidential pardon, according to local journalists and news reports. The sentence had been upheld in February. He was first imprisoned on…
Gunshots were fired into the home of Abra province journalist Marjorie Bandayrel-Trinidad on May 14, 2009, according to a local press freedom group and news reports. Bandayrel-Trinidad and her husband and child were unhurt, the reports said. Abra is in the north of the Philippines.
On May 7, 2009, the Court of Criminal Appeal in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, confirmed the provisional release of French freelance photojournalist Jean Paul Ney, who had been detained on anti-state charges since December 2007 in the Maison d’Arrêt et de Correction d’Abidjan prison. French Secretary of State for Cooperation and Francophone Countries Alain Joyandet announced the release on May 6, after a…
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.