Pakistan’s Abbas: Journalists hostage to ‘power of gun’
CPJ award winner Mazhar Abbas penned a strong Sunday op-ed piece, “Death is the only news–Challenges of working in conflict zones,” for The News. It’s about conditions for journalists working in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Baluchistan. As Abbas says, “The killing of one journalist is a message for another.” He goes on…
Gunmen kill Pakistani journalist who reported on Taliban
New York, January 17, 2012–Unidentified gunmen killed broadcast journalist Mukarram Khan Aatif in a mosque north of Peshawar today, according to news reports. Aatif was a correspondent for private TV station Dunya News and also worked for Deewa Radio, a Pashto-language channel of the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Voice of America, news reports said.
In Pakistan, a news media minefield
For the second year in a row Pakistan has topped the CPJ Killed List, making it a more dangerous place to be a journalist in 2011 than the active war zones of Libya or Iraq and Afghanistan. Senior Asia program coordinator Bob Dietz explains that Pakistani journalists are under extreme pressure from both state and…
Pakistan journalists ‘threatened by security’ personnel
After airing a piece critical of the Pakistani military, senior journalists Najam Sethi and Hamid Mir received serious threats from what they described as “both non-state and state actors.” Pakistan was the most dangerous country for journalists in 2011 and the CPJ is working to keep these journalists safe by publishing these threats, bringing them…
More revelations of threats to Pakistani journalists
We released a statement Thursday–CPJ supports Pakistani journalists facing threats–about the decision of two Pakistani journalists to publicly announce the threats they had been receiving. Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times and host of a popular Urdu-language political program on Geo TV, and Jugnu Mohsin, also a Friday Times editor, said they had lived…
CPJ supports Pakistani journalists facing threats
New York, December 29, 2011–The Committee to Protect Journalists admires and supports the decision of Pakistani journalists Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin to make public the threats that have driven them at times to live outside their country in recent months. Sethi and Mohsin are returning to their home in Lahore and are determined to…
‘Where is the state?’ asks Pakistani journalist under threat
Since making me aware of threats to Hamid Mir on December 20, Umar Cheema and I have been encouraging Pakistani journalists we know who are under threat to step forward with their own experiences. Ghulamaddin, producer for Samaa TV in Karachi who broke the story of students held in chains at a seminary, is coming…
More on threats and journalist safety in Pakistan
Tuesday’s blog about threats to Hamid Mir generated a lot of discussion on our site. Mir messaged overnight, saying his case was widely reported in newspapers and discussed in Parliament, and there will be a committee of Parliament established to probe the issue. The Associated Press of Pakistan noted that “Minster for Interior Rehman Malik condemned the…
Pakistan’s Hamid Mir publicizes a death threat
Geo TV’s most prominent television anchor, and one of the most prominent journalists in Pakistan, has just circulated a detailed email message of threats he has been receiving. Hamid Mir’s open, public response to the threats is a textbook case of how to handle the steady stream of intimidation that journalists face, not just in…