Alerts

Bogotá, March 11, 2002— Seven journalists who have covered high-profile criminal investigations for major Colombian media organizations were threatened with death and given three days to leave the country.

A message typed on a card used to request a Catholic prayer for the dead accused the journalists of being "gossipy sons-of-bitches who with their lies have led the Attorney General's Office to screw around with our people."

New York, March 8, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed at the recent detention of two Al-Jazeera cameramen by Egyptian security forces.

Mohamed Ezzedine El-Najjar and Mohamed Eid Galal were filming a pro-Palestinian student protest at the campus of Alexandria University on the morning of March 5, according to sources at Al-Jazeera's Cairo bureau.

Egyptian security officers approached El-Najjar and Galal as the two journalists were loading equipment into their car. El-Najjar and Galal displayed their press credentials, but were told that they did not have permission to film and would be taken in for questioning at the Bab Sharq police station.

Bogotá, March 7, 2002—Leftist guerrillas forced a radio station to shut down after accusing it of serving government interests.

Onda Zero, based in the southern Colombian town of Acevedo, Huila Department, stopped broadcasting on the evening of February 28, when some 10 fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) threatened to blow up the station and then made off with a transmitter, antennas, and other equipment valued at US$12,500, said director José Vicente Rodríguez.

Moscow, March 7, 2002—Three representatives of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today completed a four-day mission to Russia with an urgent call for the release of jailed Russian journalist Grigory Pasko.

"We are here to support our Russian colleagues in attempting to free Grigory Pasko, and to halt what seems to be an increasingly heavy-handed attempt to crush the development of a free press in Russia," said Terry Anderson, CPJ's honorary co-chairman, at a press conference in Moscow.

New York, March 6, 2002—The British-led international peacekeeping force warned reporters today of a credible threat to kidnap foreign journalists.

"Information about threats come and go all the time, but this is the first one assessed as credible enough to pass on to journalists," said Lt. Col. Neal Peckham of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), according to CNN. Peckham said that the kidnap plans concerned journalists in Kabul. However, an ISAF press officer said the threat was not specific to any region of Afghanistan, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency.

New York, March 5, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about a recent Jordanian court decision to delay the publication of the opposition weekly Al Majd.

On March 3, the State Security Court banned the publication of the March 4 issue of Al-Majd unless the paper's management agreed to remove two articles about alleged government corruption.

One of the articles detailed a large-scale financial scandal. The second article was critical of former internal security chief Samih El-Bateekhi.

New York, March 5, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release of Tamrat Zuma, former publisher and editor-in-chief of the defunct Amharic-language weekly Atkurot, after more than nine months in prison.

At the beginning of 2001, seven Ethiopian journalists were in prison for their work, according to CPJ research, making Ethiopia Africa's leading jailer of journalists. With Zuma's release, there are now no journalists in jail because of their professional activities.

New York, NY, March 4, 2002 —Kathleen Kenna, a correspondent for the Toronto Star, was seriously wounded when her car was attacked by unidentified assailants, according to press reports. Kenna was traveling with her husband, freelance photographer Hadi Dadashian; Star photographer Bernard Weil; and an Afghan driver on the main road from Kabul to Gardez. None of the other passengers were hurt.

Weil told the Toronto Star that one man threw a rock at the car from left side, and then an explosion from an unidentified object hit the right side, where Kenna was sitting. Kenna was hit in the leg.

Vladivostok, March 4, 2002 —Three representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called for the release of jailed Russian journalist Grigory Pasko at a press conference in Vladivostok today.

A CPJ request to meet with Pasko in prison was turned down by a local military official, who said the request would be given a written response only within the next month. Pasko is serving a four-year sentence for treason.

CPJ is alarmed by the resignation of Shaheen Sehbai, the influential editor of The News, one of Pakistan's leading English-language newspapers. Sehbai said today in a resignation letter addressed to his boss but circulated among colleagues and friends that he was leaving his post under pressure from the government, warning that Pakistani officials were sending a message to the press to "Get in line, or be ready for the stick."