New York, July 5, 2005—A district court in Minsk has handed down judgments against the opposition daily Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) in three separate civil defamation trials and ordered the daily to pay a total of 115 million Belarusian rubles (US$53,500) in damages, according to local and international reports. Narodnaya Volya staff told the…
New York, July 5, 2005—An Iraqi television producer for the state news channel Al-Iraqiya was killed on Friday in Mosul after being kidnapped earlier in the day, according to international press reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating the circumstances surrounding the slaying of Khaled al-Attar, who produced a program satirizing government officials. Insurgents…
New York, July 5, 2005—A radio commentator was ambushed and shot at least 15 times by a gang of motorcycle-riding assailants while driving home on the southern island of Mindanao on Sunday. Rolando “Dodong” Morales, who died at the scene, had just finished hosting his weekly program on radio dxMD in General Santos City. The…
New York, July 5, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the imprisonment of two radio journalists in Bossasso, a city in the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland. Sheekh Aduun, director of the Bossasso radio affiliate of the private STN network, and Awale Jama, an editor at the station, have been in police…
New York, July 5, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned by the arrest of two reporters for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Asa’ad Abad, the capital of Konar Province in eastern Afghanistan late last week. The reporters remain in custody in the capital, Kabul, according to Radio Free Afghanistan’s chief editor, Sharifa…
New York, June 30, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists deplores the Hunan Supreme People’s Court decision to uphold the conviction of journalist Shi Tao on charges of “illegally leaking state secrets abroad.” The ruling makes it more likely that Shi will serve out the bulk of a 10-year prison sentence for e-mailing to the editor…
Restrictive regimes around the world came out ahead. Many were already taking a cue from a U.S. case involving the leak of a CIA officer’s name when the Supreme Court announced this week that it would not hear an appeal by two journalists. The reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times, face 18-month jail terms for not revealing their confidential sources.
JUNE 30 and JULY 1, 2005 Posted: July 18, 2005 Luc Mikomo, RAGA TV HARASSED RAGA FM, RAGA TV, and RAGA Plus CENSORED As opposition groups protested a delay in national elections originally due to take place by June 30, security forces detained Mikomo, news director at RAGA TV, for several hours in the capital,…
JUNE 30, 2005 Posted: July 12, 2005 Tadesse Kabede, Lisane Hezeb Fassil Yenalem, Addis ZenaDaniel Gezahegne, Moged LEGAL ACTION The editors of three private weeklies were arrested and charged in connection with their work, according to CPJ sources and the Addis Ababa-based Ethiopian Free Press Journalists’ Association (EFJA). Kabede, Yenalem, and Gezahegne were released after…