News from Ethiopia, Kosovo, Egypt

Local sources told SEEMO that Serbeze Haxhiaj, a journalist with public radio Radio Kosova, part of Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK) in Pristina, has received a number of threats starting late last month from individuals who identified themselves as former superior officers in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) / Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës (UCK).

IPI joined 27 other free expression and human rights groups on the second anniversary of the unsolved killing of Russian editor Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev in Dagestan to repeat a call for Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee to take charge of the investigation.The groups initially made the request in a letter sent to the head of the Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, on Nov. 2, 2014, the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.

IPI condemned provisions of a proposed new anti-terrorism law in Egypt that would criminalise contradicting official reports on militant attacks, calling it a dangerous move to censor critical voices. The move followed a series of deadly militant attacks, including a jihadist attack on the military last Wednesday in the Sinai Peninsula, in which several news outlets reported death tolls to be higher than that of official military reports.

Akshay Singh, 38, was the third journalist who had been investigating corruption to die in India in the past month, and the second to die in the north central state of Madhya Pradesh. At the time of his death, Singh, a journalist with the special investigations team of the Aaj Tak television channel, was investigating dozens of deaths connected with the high-profile “Vyapam scam”.