Yemeni journalist and human rights activist assassinated
Journalist, human rights activist and liberal Houthi supporter Abdul Kareem al-Khaiwani was assassinated in Sana’a by unknown gunmen on a motorcycle on March 18, 2015.
His assassination came on the fourth anniversary of the Karama massacre of over 40 anti-government protesters in Yemen by security forces and supporters of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011.
Since 2004, Al-Khaiwani had been arbitrarily detained, beaten and intimated for his anti-government reporting. He received death threats and spent time in prison for “insulting” Saleh.
In 2008, Amnesty International awarded Al-Khaiwani with the Special Award for Human Rights Journalism Under Threat while he was in prison. He was praised by International Federation of Journalists president Jim Boumelha, who received the award on his behalf:
He is one of those rare breed of journalists, some of the bravest and the most determined — those who are prepared to sacrifice their personal and professional lives for the public good and to put their future and even the future of their families and children at risk in order to ensure that our profession remains one of the strongest backbones of our democracies
In a talk given at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2010, al-Khaiwani said:
“Living in Yemen is like living in a hijacked train, or a plane flown by an epileptic pilot.”
During the takeover of Sana’a by Houthi militias last February, al-Khaiwani supported their efforts to form a government, a stance for which he drew the ire of revolutionary activists.
Yemeni netizens and Khaiwani’s colleagues were horrified by the news of his assassination, despite differences of opinion:
The story of the Friday of Karama (dignity) was told in the Oscar-nominated documentary Karama Has No Walls:
