New York, September 12, 2003—Zimbabwean authorities have shuttered the offices of the Harare-based Daily News, the country’s only independent daily. A Daily News staffer who answered the phone at the newspaper’s offices this evening said that “our operations are being ceased.” According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), a Daily News reporter said today that “about 20…
New York, September 11, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is outraged by a police attack earlier this week on a group of independent and opposition journalists outside the police headquarters in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. The attack occurred after 4 p.m. on Monday, September 8, in front of the headquarters while the journalists, were covering…
New York, September 11, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the overnight detention of two Al-Jazeera journalists by U.S. forces in Iraq. U.S. troops detained correspondent Atwar Bahgat and her cameraman, Yasser Bahgat (no relation), last night in the Ghazaliya section of the capital, Baghdad. Atwar Bahgat told CPJ that she…
New York, September 11, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has learned that Ruslan Sharipov, a jailed Uzbek journalist and human rights activist, issued a statement from prison on September 5 reporting that he pled guilty to one charge in his August trial because authorities had forced him to do so by torturing him. In…
New York, September 10, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns Algerian authorities’ recent detention of two journalists, Mohamed Benchicou, managing editor of the French-language daily Le Matin, and Ali Dilem, a cartoonist with the French-language daily Liberté. Youssef Razzouj, Le Matin’s editor, told CPJ that police arrested Benchicou on Monday, September 8, at his…
New York, September 8, 2003—Gyanendra Khadka, a journalist with the government news agency Rastriya Samachar Samiti (RSS), was killed on Sunday, September 7, in Jyamire, in Nepal’s eastern Sindhupalchowk District. CPJ is investigating the incident. According to RSS, a group of suspected Maoist rebels took Khadka away from a school where he taught part-time and…
New York, September 8, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the recent spate of attacks on journalists in the Philippines. CPJ is currently investigating the murders of three reporters killed during the last three weeks. In the most recent incident, journalist Juan “Jun” Pala was killed in the southern city of Davao on Saturday,…
New York, September 5, 2003—Russia’s Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by Russian journalist Grigory Pasko challenging his December 2001 criminal conviction for treason. Ivan Pavlov, Pasko’s attorney, told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that he received a letter on Thursday, September 4, from the Supreme Court’s deputy chairman, Anatoli Merkushov, informing…
New York, September 4, 2003—Guy Kasongo Kilembwe, a journalist who was arrested on August 29, was released today from the Penitentiary and Reeducation Center in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kilembwe, editor-in-chief of the satirical newspaper Pot-Pourri, told CPJ that his release was granted after he paid US$100 and promised to…
New York, September 3, 2003— The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about disturbing new developments in Cuba’s ongoing incarceration of independent journalists. According to family members, two imprisoned journalists, Manuel Vázquez Portal and Normando Hernández González, joined other jailed dissidents at Boniato Prison in a hunger strike that began on Sunday, August…