New York, October 6, 2006-The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the murder of Jassem Hamad Ibrahim, a driver for the Iraqi state television channel Al-Iraqiya who was shot by unidentified gunmen in Mosul on Wednesday. The assailants ambushed Ibrahim at about 2 p.m. as he was running errands for the station, according to a source…
New York, October 6, 2006-The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes today’s conviction and sentencing of three people in the 2005 murder of investigative reporter Marlene Garcia-Esperat, but it calls on the government to aggressively pursue the prosecution of those who allegedly ordered the killing. CPJ also urged authorities to redouble their efforts in investigating the…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists urgently calls on your interim government to quickly and unconditionally restore provisions guaranteeing press freedom that were enshrined in your country’s recently abolished 1997 constitution.
New York, October 5, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by the six-year prison sentence given today to independent reporter Ulugbek Khaidarov following a two-day trial in which the prosecution’s lead witness reportedly affirmed the journalist’s innocence. Khaidarov, whose reports in independent foreign publications were critical of government and business officials, was found guilty…
New York, October 4, 2006-The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns this week’s arrest of Rudy Apolo, a columnist and publisher of the Asian Star Journal and Asia Star Balita, and three members of his editorial staff on a criminal defamation charges related to reports on alleged government corruption. The four were arrested Monday morning in…
New York, October 4, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the three-year prison sentence given today to a critical journalist in Azerbaijan on what local press freedom activists called trumped up drug charges. Sakit Zakhidov, a prominent reporter and satirist for the daily opposition newspaper Azadlyg, was convicted of drug use by a court in…
OCTOBER 3, 2006 Posted: October 13, 2006 El Meridiano de Sucre HARRASSED Several groups of unidentified individuals stopped distributors for the Sincelejo-based daily El Meridiano del Sucre, threatened them with guns and bought the majority of that day’s edition, which featured a story linking local government officials to paramilitary leaders, the daily’s editorial director Elsa…
New York, October 3, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by death threats on Islamist Web sites against a controversial commentator for the French daily Le Figaro over an article critical of the Prophet Muhammad. Robert Redeker, a high school philosophy teacher in the southwestern city of Toulouse, has gone into hiding under…
New York, October 3, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists deplores local authorities’ ongoing harassment of the independent weekly Permsky Obozrevatel, one of the few sources of independent news in the western Russian city of Perm. “We are deeply concerned by the continuing harassment of Permsky Obozrevatel,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. Perm police detained…