1 May 2008
Sami Al Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman arrested by Pakistani authorities more than six years ago and handed to the USA, has been freed from Guantanamo Bay.
Al Hajj flew on a plane from Guantanamo on 1 May to Khartoum in Sudan. Wadah Khanfar, Al Jazeera Network Director General, travelled to the Sudanese capital to meet the Network’s cameraman. Al Hajj is a Sudanese citizen.
Khanfar, speaking on Al Jazeera English on 1 May, paid tribute to journalist colleagues who had supported Al Jazeera’s campaign to have Al Hajj freed.
Khanfar said that it was expected that Al Hajj would be taken to a hospital in Khartoum for medical treatment – his physical condition had deteriorated during his time in the US prison camp.
No formal charges have been brought by the USA against Sami Al Hajj.
1 May 2008
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30 April 2008
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30 April 2008
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28 April 2008
An attack of unprecedented scale and intensity appears to have been launched against the Internet sites of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty‘s Belarus Service and more than half a dozen other RFE/RL language broadcasting sites.
The cyber warfare started at 8a.m. Prague time, on April 26, and was ongoing as of the afternoon of Monday 28 April.
Known as “Denial of Service,” or DOS, it slows web traffic to a standstill by bombarding the system with bogus requests it has to consider and then deny. The brunt of the attack is aimed at RFE/RL’s Belarus Service and is intensifying.
RFE/RL President Jeff Gedmin compared the situation to the Cold War days when RFE/RL radio broadcasting to Communist countries was jammed. He said: “this is a different weapon to block a technologically advanced information platform, but little else has changed. Dictators are still trying to prevent the kind of unfiltered news and information that RFE/RL provides from reaching their people. They did not succeed in the last century and they will not succeed now.”
RFE/RL said that it has been taking countermeasures to restore service to affected RFE/RL Internet sites in Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kosovo in Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Croatia, as well as Belarus.
RFE/RL Belarusian Service Director Alexander Lukashuk said he began getting personal e-mails from frustrated web visitors about two hours after the weekend attack began. He said “Saturday was a particularly important day in Minsk – the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in neighbouring Ukraine. We have a large Internet audience that was relying on us to report live a rally of thousands of people, protesting the plight of uncompensated Chernobyl victims and a government decision to build a new nuclear power station.”
Lukashuk said a similar attack was launched against the Belarusian website on the 21st anniversary of Chernobyl in 2007 but it lasted only a few hours and did not affect other services. This weekend, other Belarusian websites were also hit, including the Minsk-based nongovernmental organization Charter 97. Lukashuk noted that many local websites in Belarus are coming to RFE/RL’s aid and have offered to carry material and reports of RFE/RL correspondents until the RFE/RL Belarus website is operational again.
