Miami (September 2, 2014)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) said today it was horrified by the execution of American journalist Steven Joel Sotloff, the second reporter to be killed in recent days by the extremist group ISIS, and expressed concern at a climate of self-censorship that could be generated in the Middle East.
A video transmitted today (Tuesday) shows the beheading of Sotloff, 31, a Miami, Florida, resident, who had been kidnapped in August 2013 on the Turkey-Syria border. He was a stringer for Time and Foreign Policy magazines. Last week his mother, Shirley Sotloff, had aired a video in which she begged for her son’s life.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, offered his heartfelt condolences to Sotloff’s family and colleagues and condemned the fact that extremists are using journalists as “a means of extortion for their terrorist and political ends.”
Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, expressed his deep concern at the possibility that episodes such as these can dissuade media, correspondents and freelance journalists from continuing with their coverage – “a self-censorship that will harm the public’s right to be informed about the Middle East’s serious conflicts.”
Sotloff’s abduction was learned of on August 19 in an ISIS video prior to the beheading of freelance reporter James Foley of the GlobalPost portal and the Agence France Presse (AFP) news agency. The two murders are in reprisal for U.S. air attacks, according to ISIS. In that video they exhibited Sotloff and threatened to execute him.
In the almost three-minutes-long video titled “A second message for the United States” ISIS also threatens to execute British citizen David Cawthorne Haines, kidnapped in March 2013.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
