Insurgents in Somalia amputated the limbs of four young men on Thursday. Ali Mohamudi Geedi, Osmail Kalif Abdule, Jeylani Mohamed Had and Abdulkadir Adow Hirale had their right hands and left legs amputated by members of the al-Shabab armed militia in front of a crowd of local people in northern...

Amnesty International has called on the Al-Shabab armed group not to carry out amputations on four men accused of robbery on Tuesday morning in Mogadishu. The four young men were sentenced on Monday to cross-amputation (amputation of the right hand and the left foot) by an “ad-hoc” court set up by...

Press Freedom Day, 3 May, has, for a number of years, been a day in which journalists and media workers marked the deaths of increasing numbers of their colleagues around the world. This year, though, there is some relief from the unrelenting bad news. The International Federation of Journalists...

Two journalists have been attacked, one fatally, in less than a week in Somalia. One man is in critical condition in hospital after a knife attack in Abudwaq last Saturday, while another was shot dead in the capital city of Mogadishu on Wednesday. Said Tahlil Ahmed, the director of Somalia’s...

Zam Zam Adbullahi has been a human rights activist in Somalia for many years. In addition to being the capacity building officer for Coalition for Grassroots Women Organizations (COGWO), she is the Chairperson of the Somali branch of the African network for prevention and Protection of child abuse...

A worker with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) was killed by unidentified gunmen in southern Somalia on Tuesday. 44-year-old Somali national Ibrahim Hussein Duale, was shot while monitoring school feeding school in a village in the Gedo region, the WFP reported.   The killing...

Over one hundred countries voted overwhelmingly in favour of a second resolution on “Moratorium on the use of the death penalty” at the United Nations (UN) on Thursday. The resolution reaffirms last year’s UN General Assembly call for a moratorium on executions. 106 states supported the resolution,...

A girl stoned to death in Somalia this week was 13 years old, not 23, contrary to earlier news reports. She had been accused of adultery in breach of Islamic law. Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was killed on Monday 27 October, by a group of 50 men in a stadium in the southern port of Kismayu, […]

Ethiopian forces and forces of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) have been accused of targeting civilians in an attack on a Mogadishu mosque on Saturday. Twenty-one people were killed in the attack, which Amnesty International has said may constitute a war crime. Eleven of the...

“It is the journalists that are telling the world what is happening… This is why everyone wants to silence us. I have thought I will die in this job, but even when I am scared I can’t be silent because, if I do not tell these stories, no one will protect the civilians. We are […]