abducted

May 5, 1999 His Excellency Muhammad Nawaz Sharif Prime Minister Prime Minister’s Secretariat Islamabad, Pakistan 2118 Kalorama Rd., N.W. Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to strongly protest the latest wave of government-sponsored attacks against independent journalists working in Pakistan. We are particularly alarmed that many of the journalists who have…

March 31,1999 — Kidnappings of Russian journalists in Russia’s secessionist republic of Chechnya have become all too common: as of April 1997, CPJ documented at least 13 journalists missing in Chechnya, the largest total in the world. Most of those abducted this year are believed to be alive, although four who disappeared in 1995 are…

Updated January 1, 1999Tahar Djaout, Ruptures, May 26, 1993Rabah Zenati, Algerian State Television (ENTV), August 3, 1993Abdelhamid Benmeni, Algérie-Actualité, August 9, 1993Saad Bakhtaoui, El-Minbar, September 9, 1993Abderrahmane Chergou, PAGS party paper, September 28, 1993

Liberian broadcast journalist Alex Redd became the focus of international attention late last year when he was kidnapped and tortured by state security forces for attempting to investigate and report on the murder of political opposition leader Samuel Dokie, his wife, and two family members. Upon release, Redd was arrested and tried for inciting the…

YELENA MASYUK, correspondent for NTV, captured the world’s attention when she was kidnapped by Chechen armed rebels May 10 and held, along with her two crew members, for 100 days in harsh, inhumane conditions, most of the time in damp mountain caves. She had covered the Chechen war in 1994 for NTV and had endeavored…

For most of the U.S. media, there was only one “South America story” last winter and well into the spring: the four-month stand-off in Lima between the hostage-holding Tupac Amaru guerrillas and the government of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. The media’s focus on Peru obscured an important story that galvanized public opinion in another major…

The publication in March of CPJ’s Attacks on the Press in 1996 was the culmination of months of intense preparation by CPJ staff, investigating and verifying more than 1,000 documented cases of violations of press freedom worldwide. The 376-page volume, edited by Publications Director Alice Chasan, is the longest and most comprehensive of CPJ’s annual…

Faced with a mounting toll of Russian journalists’ abductions, the new Chechen government has heavily restricted reporters’ movements. The May kidnapping of independent Russian NTV’s prominent war reporter Yelena Masyuk and two crew members was the latest in a string of kidnappings, possibly related to the intention of some Chechen factions to derail the 1996…

Africa For the third consecutive year, Ethiopia held more journalists in jail–31 at year’s end–than any other country in Africa. Most were detained without charges.