Call for investigation into killing of newspaper editor in Mosul

Reporters Without Borders today called on the Iraqi police and US-British coalition forces to set up a commission to establish the exact circumstances of the death of Ahmed Shawkat, the editor of the weekly Bila Ittijah (Without Direction), yesterday in the northern city Mosul. The Associated Press said Shawkat was shot dead on the roof of his office in Mosul .Two men had reportedly followed him up to the roof when he went there to make a phone call. His daughter Roaa Shawkat, who also worked for Bila Ittijah, said Shawkat had issued "calls for democracy and our people don't understand the meaning of democracy - maybe the Islamists have taken a stance against him for that reason." Shawkat had reportedly received threatening letters telling him to close down his newspaper. His daughter described him as a man of integrity: "He used to write against the resistance, against the Americans, against the local government and the former government." Some people clearly did not like the fact that he had "a view and a principle," she added. In a report issued in July entitled "The Iraqi media: a new but fragile freedom," Reporters Without Borders voiced concern about harassment and threats against Iraqi journalists because of the intolerance of political parties that are used to settling ideological differences by means of violence. Explicit threats from various political groups, accusing journalists of being either "saddamiye" (sympathetic to Saddam Hussein's return) or "traitors" under the heel of the Americans, have resulted in considerable self-censorship by the Iraqi press. The often aggressive and brutal attitude of US soldiers and frequent arrests of journalists have reinforced the tendency to be prudent and apply self-censorship. Samer Hamza, a cameraman with the Arabic-language TV network Al-Jazeera, was detained by US soldiers near a Baghdad police station that was targeted during a day of intense violence on 27 October. He was finally released today without being given any official explanation for his arrest. The US army reportedly suspected him and his driver of having advanced knowledge of the attack. His arrest brought to four the number of known cases of journalists arrested and briefly detained by US forces this month. Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Husein Nussaif was arrested by Iraqi police in Shahraban (about 100 km from Baghdad) on 3 October and spent three days in prison, in the custody of both the US army and Iraqi authorities, before finally being released after an Al-Jazeera lawyer intervened. He was never told why he had been arrested. Agence France-Presse photographer Patrick Baz and a Reuters journalist were detained in similar circumstances for several hours on 19 October in a police station in the city of Fallujah. The Iraqi police said they were acting on the orders of the US army, which was looking for someone who had filmed an attack on one of its convoys in Fallujah.