New York, January 14, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is greatly concerned by the detention and upcoming trial of Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh in Mazar-i-Sharif, Balkh province, northern Afghanistan. The 23-year-old journalism student and brother of prominent journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi will be tried in a religious Islamic court on charges of blasphemy, according to Rahimullah…
New York, January 14, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the detention of one freelance journalist and the interrogation of three others in Minsk, and it calls on Belarusian authorities to halt persecution of the independent press. Arseny Pakhomov, a freelance photographer working for the independent weekly Nasha Niva, was arrested and sentenced…
New York, January 11, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists applauds the arraignment yesterday of two suspects in the 2001 killing of Philippine radio reporter Rolando Ureta. In a December 21 alert, CPJ called on the government to “vigorously prosecute” the case of the two suspects, Amador Raz and Jessie Ticar, who were arrested separately on…
CPJ mourns the loss of Niger radio director New York, January 9, 2008—CPJ mourns the untimely death of the director of Niger’s first independent radio station, Radio R & M (Radio and Music), based in the capital, Niamey, after his car drove over a landmine yesterday on the city’s outskirts. Abdou Mahamane, commonly known as…
New York, January 8, 2008—Police in Dar-es-Salaam said Monday that they had two suspects in custody after armed men stormed the newsroom of a popular vernacular newspaper and seriously injured two top journalists, according to local reporters and news accounts. Managing Editor Saed Kubenea of the Kiswahili-language Mwana Halisi and veteran journalist Ndimara Tegambwage, a…
New York, January 7, 2008—Police arrested freelance journalist Idle Moallim on Sunday in the northeastern city of Bossasso in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, local journalists told CPJ. Police arrested Moallim for “misreporting” a story on human trafficking in Bossasso and are holding him at Bossasso central prison, according to local journalists. Moallim is a…
New York, January 4, 2008—State regulators in the Guinean capital, Conakry, summarily suspended two private newspapers on Monday and barred their journalists from practice for three months. Local journalists and news reports say the bans were connected to December articles critical of top government officials.
New York, January 2, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the Tunisian government’s denial of a passport to Kamel Labidi, a freelance Tunisian journalist and CPJ’s Middle East representative. On July 17, Labidi, a Tunisian national, applied for a new passport at the Tunisian Embassy in Washington after losing his old one. A representative…
New York, January 2, 2008— Three Ethiopian journalists told CPJ the government denied them applications to launch new newspapers on Tuesday. All the journalists spent 17 months in prison following the country’s 2005 elections. The newspapers were slated to become the country’s first independent political publications since authorities banned eight local papers and forced at…