Posts Tagged ‘Afghanistan’
September 7th, 2010
Former TV presenter Sayed Hamid Noori was
murderedat his home in Kabul on 5 September. He had been
stabbed and his throat had been cut. The motives are unknown but he was an active member of the National Union of Afghan Journalists. Noori was a well-known TV anchor who went into politics and became the spokesman of Mohammad Yunus Qanooni, an opponent of President Hamid Karzai.
August 23rd, 2010
Defence secretary Liam Fox has called for shops to ban a computer game that allows players to act as the Taliban and kill Nato troops. Fox said he was “
disgusted and angry“ and called the game “un-British”. The
updated version of Medal of Honour, due for release in October, gives players the choice of which side to represent in its multiplayer mode. A spokesperson for the game’s publishers Electronic Arts said the format “merely reflects the fact that every conflict has two sides”. The Department of Media, Culture and Sport has distanced itself from Fox’s “
personal view“.
May 11th, 2010
Film-maker Asad Qureshi and his fixer Colonel Iman were
released last Thursday after being held
captive by the Pakistani Taliban for over a month. Khalid Khwaja, the other member of their party was
found dead on 30 April in North Waziristan. The two men were been
handed over to the Haqqani network, an independent negotiations team who have close links with the Taliban. No ransom money has been paid.
April 26th, 2010
A video
released last week demands a Taliban leader be set free in exchange for the safety of Asad Qureshi, a British journalist ,and two retired ISI officers. The
missing men left for the North Waziristan region at the end of March. A second
video featuring one of the captured the ex-ISI officers, Colonel Khalid Khawaja, was also sent to Asia Times Online. In it, Khawaja details his involvement in negotiations between militants and the army, as well as his part in the arrest of
Muhammad Abdul Aziz during the
Siege of Lal Masjid in 2007.
April 9th, 2010
A British filmmaker is missing in Northern Waziristan,
Asad Qureshi is one of the group of men who have vanished in the mountainous tribal region on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. On 26 March, two former ISI agents set off with Qureshi and another British filmmaker to conduct interviews with Taliban leaders. No other reports have surfaced regarding their whereabouts but a
Pakistani army spokesperson has confirmed that they have not been detained by any intelligence agencies.
April 6th, 2010
Kosuke Tsuneoka, a freelance Japanese journalist who has been
missing since March 31, has been found imprisoned in the province of Baghlan,
according to a local Afghan reporter on Sunday. The Afghan authorities say that they were not aware of
Tsuneoka’s presence in the country until his disappearance received publicity, it has been suggested he did not have the right visa/accreditation.
March 17th, 2010
Afghanistan has watered down plans to
ban the media from reporting on live attacks. Authorities had claimed such reports would embolden militants, but an outcry resulted in a new resolution being hammered over three days. The new resolution bars the press from showing the faces of security personal or broadcasting “disturbing” images, but allows media to report on live attacks. The law does not define “disturbing”. Afghan journalists’ groups said they remained suspicious of the motives behind the new guidelines, which they believed could be used to
cover up government failings.
January 12th, 2010
The Home Secretary’s decision to ban an extremist group shows exactly why we must not allow sentiment to overrule free speech says Padraig Reidy
(more…)
