Case

Zuhair Latif, a Tunisian journalist with the Arabic Web site of news channel France 24, was detained for two days before being expelled from Sudan on March 1, 2009, the channel reported the following day.

On February13, 2009, Venezuelan authorities arrested Rafael Segundo Pérez, a former sergeant for the Carabobo police, in connection to the January 16 killing of journalist Orel Sambrano, according to local news reports. Pérez is accused of working as a hired assassin and conspiring to commit a crime.

On March 13, 2009, Ecuadoran journalist Emilio Palacio told local reporters that he had received threats against himself and his family following a March 1 article criticizing President Rafael Correa’s weekly radio address. 

In a ruling issued on January 9, 2009, the state-run media regulator, the High Communication Council, suspended from circulation the private daily Le Citoyen for one month for allegedly violating journalism ethics, according to news reports and local journalists.  

Hussein al-Sawas, editor of Al-Baidha Press Web site and Al-Tajdeed newspaper, told CPJ that on January 23, 2009, he was kidnapped, hit, and detained for five days by bodyguards of the governor of al-Baidha, Muhammad Naser al-Amri.  

The Sudanese weekly Al-Maidan was not issued on February 10, 2009, because of official censorship, Abdul Qadir Muhammad, a reporter for the newspaper told CPJ in an e-mail. Muhammad wrote that the Sudanese security staff responsible for censorship omitted six articles and the banner headline on the front page and at least 10 articles in…

An appeals court in the Senegalese capital of Dakar upheld a three-year prison sentence against imprisoned editor El Malick Seck on February 23, 2009, according to international and local news reports. The case involved an editorial implicating President Abdoulaye Wade and his son Karim in an alleged money-laundering scandal.

Early in the morning of February 9, 2009, about 25 gunshots were fired from at least one assault rifle at the home of Moíses García Castro, editor-in-chief of the Guasave-based daily El Debate in the western Mexican state of Sinaloa, according to local news reports and CPJ interviews. There was minor damage to the house…

According to the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, Noorul Hasan, Royal TV’s Peshawar bureau chief, was kidnapped on February 8, when a group of armed men in two cars stopped his car while he and his crew were returning from Swat in North West Frontier Province. The others were not harmed, but Hasan said he…

Algerian police confiscated journalist Mohamed Benchicou’s new manuscript, The Journal a Free Man, from a printing plant in Blida, south of Algiers. In a statement posted on several news Web sites, Benchicou said security forces raided the printer and ordered the director to cease the printing job. The raid came a few days before Algeria…