- Moscow Bureau photographer Yuri Timofeev was detained by police at the site of Khimki Forest protests on July 23, 2010. Together with about 30 demonstrators, he was taken to the town of Khimki to appear in court to charges of “minor hooliganism” and resisting police action. Timofeev was released from court custody the same day due to lack of evidence, although it’s not clear if charges were dropped.
- Chechen correspondent Suryana Asuyeva resigned from RFE’s North Caucasus service on May 31, 2010 after being visited and threatened by FSB agents the day before.
- Alvi Kerimov, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov‘s chief spokesperson, accused RFE/RL of espionage on a talk show broadcast on November 24, 2009 on Chechen State Television and Radio Company (ChGTRK), Chechnya’s main state-sponsored TV channel. Kerimov did not name anyone specifically, but said that RFE/RL correspondents in Chechnya had sold out to the enemies for “a thousand dollars.” According to RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service Director, such a verbal charge is unprecedented.
- Moscow Bureau photographer, Yuri Timofeev, was detained with several other journalists and demonstrators while covering a January 29 rally organized by Yabloko supporters protesting political assassinations in Russia.
- On January 26, 2008 Moscow-based Russian Service broadcaster Danila Galperovich was detained by plainclothes police officers in Nazran, Ingushetia while trying to report on a demonstration against government repression and corruption. He and six of his colleagues were held at a police station, then moved from Nazran to Vladikavkaz in neighboring North Ossetia by Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs forces. Galperovich told Human Rights Watch he was manhandled by police and shoved into a police car when he tried to ask an officer how many people had suffered in a clash between law enforcement officials and the protesters.
- RFE/RL’s Russian Service lost three quarters of its local radio partners in Russia in 2007 under pressure from the Russian government which threatened to cancel their broadcast licenses if they continued to work with RFE/RL. Public airwave frequencies in Russia remain under strict government control.
- Yuri Bagrov and Fatima Tlisova, who both covered the North Caucasus for RFE/RL, the Associated Press and other outlets, were forced to leave Russia in early 2007 after enduring years of harassment and threats from Russian and local officials.
- A longtime stringer for RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir Service based in Orenburg was told by her employer to stop contributing to RFE/RL, a broadcaster termed by her supervisor “hostile to Russia,” or face dismissal from her job at a local television station.
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Alhurra correspondent Bashar Fahmi has been missing in Syria for 9 months 28 days.
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