Middle East & North Africa

In an emotional address to Turkey’s parliament today, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi as a savage and premeditated act and demanded that Saudi officials be brought to Turkey to stand trial. Most of the information about the investigation that has emerged has come through leaks to the Turkish…

New York, October 19, 2018–Saudi state media today reported that the country’s attorney general has confirmed prominent journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi died in the country’s Turkey consulate, The Associated Press reported. A statement by the attorney general said that Khashoggi was killed after a fight inside the consulate on October 2, and…

Syrian writer Souleman Yousph, a contributor to several media outlets, including the Assyrian news website Ankawa, the independent Arabic news website Elaph, and the political and cultural online secular magazine Ahewar, was arrested and detained without charge on September 30, 2018, and held for five days. An eyewitness to the arrest who asked to remain…

New York, October 6, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Saudi Arabia to immediately account for the whereabouts of prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who has not been seen since entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Multiple news outlets reported today that Turkish authorities, who have been investigating his disappearance…

Beirut, October 3, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who has been living in self-imposed exile in the U.S. since 2017, and urges Saudi authorities to immediately disclose his whereabouts. Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post and a former editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan who…

[EDITOR’S NOTE: See CPJ’s updated safety advisory here https://cpj.org/2019/11/cpj-safety-advisory-journalist-targets-of-pegasus-.php.] In a report published on September 18, Citizen Lab said it had detected Pegasus, a spyware created for mobile devices, in over 45 countries. Pegasus, which transforms a cellphone into a mobile surveillance station, could have been deployed against a range of journalists and civil society…

Marwan al-Mureisi knew the rules: even in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “new” Saudi Arabia, issues touching on politics, religion, or the royal family were out of bounds. So in his reporting for the privately owned website Sabq and other outlets, al-Mureisi wrote about science, technology, and the need to embrace creativity and innovation–all hallmarks…

New York, September 17, 2018–The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition’s airstrike on a Yemeni radio station yesterday. The airstrike against the Ansar Allah-controlled Al-Maraweah Radio Broadcasting Center, located in Al-Maraweah District in Hodeida Governorate, killed three employees as well as a civilian in the vicinity of the building, according…

Between July 14 and September 6, 2018, at least seven Iraqi journalists were assaulted or detained while covering protests over government corruption and the lack of basic services in several cities across Iraq, and the offices of two local media outlets were set on fire, according to news reports, the journalists’ employers, the local press…