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ing corruption. They were journalists like Dmitry Kholodov
and Manik Saha.
Kholodov, an investigative reporter tracking allegations
of corruption in the Russian military, was murdered in 1994
when a briefcase carrying what he thought to be classified
documents exploded as it opened. Saha may have been many
miles and years apart when he was killed in 2004 in
Bangladesh, but he was also an investigative journalist killed
by explosives, murdered when a bomb was thrown into his
rickshaw as he made his way home. His offense was probing
too deeply into extortion and Maoist groups, and a leftist
political organization took credit for his death.
Like so many other cases, investigations into their
deaths were delayed or halted outright. Nearly a decade
after Kholodov’s killing, a Russian military tribunal acquitted
the military officials accused of the crime. “It’s as if our
son didn’t even exist and that no one ever killed him,”
Kholodov’s mother, Zoya, told CPJ.
In Bangladesh, a judge threw out the case against Saha’s
accused killers and ordered a “reinvestigation.” “That’s their
strategy,” said Mainul Islam Khan, a press advocate for the
Bangladesh Center for Development Journalism and Communication.
“To delay as long as possible so the drive for
justice becomes weaker and people will finally forget about
the verdict.”
While Kholodov and Saha’s deaths have been attributed to
governments and political groups, their cases are remarkably
similar to those of hundreds of other journalists murdered
since 1992. Cases are closed without explanation, evidence is
ignored, and witnesses are intimidated or attacked.
Colleagues of Orlando Sierra Hernández know this last
fact well. Deputy editor of La Patria in Manizales, Colombia,
Sierra was shot twice on a main street as he and his daughter
walked back to the newsroom after lunch in January
2002. Sierra had long probed corruption within la coalición,
a political cabal that governed his province with absolute
authority. In Sierra’s case, the hit man and two others were
convicted and jailed, but testimony and evidence pointing to
the intellectual authors have led nowhere. A judge and at
least two prosecutors have beseeched investigators to follow
up on witness statements that a local politician ordered the
Diario La Patria
Orlando Sierra Hernández
hit. Three of those witnesses have since been killed, but the
politician has yet to be formally questioned by investigators.
“It would be a shame for Colombia’s judiciary system if
this becomes another case closed with only the material
authors in prison when everything surrounding this murder—the
systematic disappearance of clues and sources,
key witnesses gone missing or murdered—points at powerful
local political interests behind the crime,” said Enrique
Santos, editor of Bogotá’s El Tiempo, which has investigated
the case extensively.
The killings tell much about a country’s commitment to
the rule of law. In the few cases where justice has been served,
police, advocates, and community leaders combined to condemn
the killings and to prosecute the killers to the fullest. In
the 1996 murder of Irish reporter Veronica Guerin, a near-folk
Cover Story | Deadly News
hero due to her groundbreaking
investigations into Dublin’s
criminal underworld, community
uproar led to the capture
of three criminal leaders said
to have ordered the murder.
The Guerin slaying was one
of the “defining moments in the
debate about law and order in
Ireland,” said Ian O’Donnell, a
professor of criminology at Veronica Guerin
the University of Dublin. “The
calculated killing of a journalist indicated that criminal
gangs felt they could operate with complete impunity.” The
Irish government went on to establish a specialized law
AP
34 Fall | Winter 2006 Dangerous Assignments 35