Crisis: International

BBC reporter freed after 114 days
AFTER BEING held hostage for 114 days, British journalist Alan Johnston was finally released on the early morning of July 4. His freedom was the result of intervention by senior Muslim clerics and negotiations between Hamas and Johnston’s kidnappers.
Hamas leader and former prime minister Ismael Haniyeh received Johnston at his home immediately after his release. There Johnston said, “It is just the most fantastic thing to be free. It was an appalling experience, as you can imagine, to be held for 16 weeks… I often dreamed I was free and woke up to find myself still in that room… I cannot get over being free… I am very grateful to everyone, an enormous number of people, who worked with the Palestinians, in the British government, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.), from the bottom to the top, and all the BBC’s listeners.”
Johnston, who said he had not been tortured, was finally freed as a result of the intervention of the Popular Resistance Committees, one of the most senior groups of Muslim clerics in the Gaza Strip, which issued a fatwa condemning his abduction.
Since seizing control in the Gaza Strip on June 15, Hamas had steadily stepped up its pressure on the group holding Johnston, the Army of Islam, and had surrounded its hideout in west Gaza. The intervention of the Popular Resistance Committees resulted in direct negotiations between Nizar Rayan, a senior Hamas leader, and Moumtaz Dogmush, the head of the kidnappers.
Johnston’s release was part of a prisoner exchange, in which Army of Islam leader Khattab Al-Maqdissi, who was arrested by Hamas’s Executive Force on July 1, and five other Army of Islam members were freed in return for the release of some 10 Hamas members who were kidnapped a few days ago.—RSF/IFEX

New terror charges brought against jailed editor
THE MINISTRY of National Security (MNB) in Azerbaijan brought a new criminal charge of terrorism and incitement to ethnic and religious hatred against Eynulla Fatullayev on July 3. It also interrogated three journalists from the now-shuttered Azeri-language daily Gündalik Azarbaycan on July 4.
The government formally charged Fatullayev with terrorism in Sabail District Court in Baku, the capital and largest city in Azerbaijan. The government’s intention to file terror charges was first disclosed on May 16. Together, the new charges could bring up to 17 years in prison. Fatullayev is already serving a 30-month jail term for a libel conviction.
According to local press reports and the Institute for Reporter Freedom and Safety (IRFS), a Baku-based press freedom group, the MNB charged Fatullayev with terrorism, and incitement of national, ethnic, or religious hatred. The charges stem from a commentary headlined, “The Aliyevs Go to War,” published earlier this year in the Russian-language weekly Realny Azerbaijan and written by Rovshan Bagirov. The commentary focused on President Ilham Aliyev’s foreign policy regarding Iran and it contained harshly critical language about the Azerbaijani government. Ministry officials did not elaborate on the charges or explain how the piece amounted to terrorism and incitement of hatred.
On July 4, the ministry interrogated Gündalik Azarbaycan editors Shahvaled Chobanoglu, Uzeir Jafarov, and Khalid Kazimli about the paper’s financing, its sales, the topics Fatullayev covered, and the weekly’s editorial independence from Realny Azerbaijan. Chobanoglu was also questioned about “The Aliyevs Go to War,” although the piece did not appear in Gündalik Azarbaycan, the IRFS reported.
Local authorities evicted both Realny Azerbaijan and Gündalik Azarbaycan from their Baku offices on May 21, saying that the office building violated safety regulations. Authorities seized computers from the premises, which have been sealed.
On June 6, a Baku judge upheld an earlier libel conviction against Eynulla Fatullayev and left intact his 30-month jail sentence. In April, Fatullayev was sentenced to 30 months in prison on charges of libeling and insulting Azerbaijanis in a piece that the journalist said he did not write. Fatullayev said the charges were fabricated.—CPJ/IFEX

Journalist death toll surpasses 100 this year—INSI
MORE than 100 journalists have lost their lives in the past six months, their death toll looking to surpass the record level reached in 2006, the International News Safety Institute (INSI) reported.
“This is a shocking development. We have never known such a high death toll half-way through a year, and we fear for what might come,” said INSI director Rodney Pinder.
According to INSI, 72 of the casualties worldwide over the past six months were murdered, including prominent cases such as Hrant Dink, the high-profile editor of an Armenian newspaper in Turkey who was shot outside his office in Istanbul; freelance photographer Edward Chikombo, whose badly beaten body was found in roadside bushes in Zimbabwe; and Ajmal Naqshbandi and Syed Agha, kidnapped with Italian reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Mastrogiacomo was released unharmed.
While most journalists’ attackers go unpunished—nearly 90 percent, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists —seven men, in a surprise move, were jailed in China on June 28 for killing investigative reporter Lan Chengzhang. The reporter died in early January after he was beaten for covering a story on an illegal coal mine in Shanxi province, the International Federation of Journalists  reported.
Iraq once again is the deadliest hotspot—accounting for 42 journalists and media workers killed this year alone, up from 28 at the same time last year. The great majority of them were local Iraqi journalists murdered by unidentified assailants. According to INSI, four more journalists were killed in Iraq last week, bringing the total to 214 media workers who have died in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003.
Poet and journalist Rahim al-Maliki, host of two cultural programs on Al-Iraqiya TV, was one of 13 killed in a suicide bombing on the Mansour Hotel in Baghdad on June 25 while covering a meeting of tribal chiefs, reported Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
The following day, veteran reporter Hamed Sarhan was ambushed and killed in Baghdad as he was driving home, said RSF. Sarhan had worked for more than 30 years for the state-owned news agency until the US-led invasion of Iraq. Since then, he had worked for the private news agency Iraquion.
ARTICLE 19, a press-freedom advocacy group, reported that Zena Shakir Mahmoud, a journalist for the Kurdish Party newspaper Al-Haqiqa and a former news presenter for an Iraqi radio station, was shot dead in Mosul on her way home on June 24.
And Luay Suleiman, a Christian reporter working with newspaper Nineveh al-Hurra in Mosul, was found dead on June 27, allegedly killed by gunmen, said INSI.
Since the report’s launch on June 28, two more journalists in Iraq, correspondents for the Iraqi Islamic Party-owned television station Baghdad TV, have been found dead. Mohammed Hilal Karji was kidnapped outside of his home on June 8 as he was getting ready for work, RSF reported. His body was found in the morgue the next day. Sarmad Hamdi al-Hassani was kidnapped in his home in Baghdad on June 27; his body was also found in the morgue the following day.
After Iraq, the countries where most of the journalists were murdered in the first half of this year were Afghanistan (five), Haiti and the Philippines, each with four dead, Somalia, Palestine and India (three) and Sri Lanka, Mexico and Brazil (two).—IFEX

More than 200 journalists exiled since 2001—CPJ
ERITREAN JOURNALIST Milkeas Mihreteab narrowly escaped arrest when his private newspaper office was raided by the authorities six years ago. He crossed local borders on foot before getting passage to the United States, where he was eventually granted asylum.
In the US, Mihreteab has worked at a coffee shop and as a security guard, but never as a journalist. And with more than a dozen journalists imprisoned in Eritrea, his prospects for going home are grim.
Mihreteab is just one of 243 cases of journalists forced into exile in the past six years because of their work, according to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Launched on World Refugee Day (June 20), “Journalists in Exile” found that of the 243 journalists, more than half of them came from just five countries: Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Colombia, and Uzbekistan. At least three journalists a month flee their home countries to escape threats of violence, prison or harassment, and only one in seven ever returns home.
Most of them flee to North America, Europe, and Africa. -CPJ/IFEX

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