Killings and imprisonment of journalists world-wide rose sharply in 2001 over the previous several years, due in part to the US war against terrorism, says the annual report of a major press watchdog group.

Thirty-seven journalists were killed around the globe as a direct result of their work last year, up from 24 in the year 2000, according to the latest edition of Attacks on the Press, released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Eight reporters were killed in Afghanistan in November alone, while two US reporters died in the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers in New York on Sept 11, says the report.

But most of the journalists were killed in retaliation for their reporting on corruption or other forms of government crimes, in such countries as Bangladesh, China, Thailand, and Yugoslavia, says to the 612-page report.

While Afghanistan accounted for the most killings, Colombia, a perennial leader in the murder of journalists, saw eight media workers murdered in the course of the year.

Three were clearly killed for their reports on army-backed, right wing paramilitaries or on corruption; five others were slain for unknown motives.

Jailed journalists

The number of journalists imprisoned jumped by a comparable percentage during the year, from 81 in 2000 to 118 in 2001.

China led the world for the third year in a row with 35 journalists behind bars at year-end, followed by Nepal with 17, Turkey with 13, Burma with 12, and Eritrea with 11.

Most of those put in prison were locked up after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as governments quietly took advantage of the war against terrorism by acting against critical media.

"In the wake of Sept 11, 2001, journalists around the world faced a press freedom crisis that was truly global in scope,'' says the report's introduction by CPJ director Ann Cooper.

She noted that in the first days after the attacks, government across the globe  in China, Benin, Zimbabwe, and the Palestine Authority Terrorities  ''took action to curb reporting on the assault and its aftermath".

The administration of US President George W Bush was no exception. After the attacks, the State Department moved to censor a Voice of America (VOA) radio interview with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and subsequently asked the major US television networks not to broadcast unedited tapes of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

US warplanes in November bombed the Kabul offices of Al Jazeera, the Qatari television station that broadcast bin Laden's videotapes, claiming that the building in which it was situated was ''a known al Qaeda facility''.

That attack, for which the Pentagon declined to apologise, set a precedent for Israel, which in December bombed and bulldozed the Voice of Palestine's radio facilities in the West Bank and then one month later destroyed the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation building in Ramallah.

Important gains

The news was not all bad for press freedom, according to Cooper, who said 2001 marked ''important gains'' for the independent media in several nations.

In Yugoslavia, for example, journalists who experienced the reign of former president Slobodan Milosevic ''breathed easier'' for the first time in a decade.

While in Syria, independent newspapers were published outside of state control for the first time in nearly 40 years. In Sri Lanka, the government lifted formal press censorship.

In Ethiopia, seven of eight journalists who were languishing in prison were released after a CPJ campaign to gain their freedom, while in Cuba and Iran, the governments freed two journalists who had won CPJ International Press Freedom Awards in 1999 and 2000, respectively.

''These releases are powerful evidence that even the most hard-line opponents of press freedom are not immune to international pressure,'' says Cooper, who noted that both Cuba and Iran were on CPJ's 2001 "Ten Worst Enemies of the Press" list.

While those represented some of the advances, Cooper says the year ended with many questions unanswered about the future of press freedom in light of the anti-terrorist war, particularly given the way in which governments have used the war on terror to crack down on independent media.

Wrong signal

The US example in 2001, she writes, could be particularly damaging if only because others countries see Washington as a model.

In addition to its attempted censorship of VOA and the bin Laden tapes and its attack on the Al Jazeera bureau, Washington also imprisoned a Texas journalist for more than five months for refusing to hand over her research notes in a murder case to a grand jury.

''This sends exactly the wrong signal to authoritarian governments, who may now show even less restraint in using state power to restrict press freedom,'' Cooper writes.

The report, which includes special sections on press freedom in Burma, Colombia and Syria, noted that while no reporters were killed in Africa because of their work, it was nonetheless a discouraging year.

For example, in Eritrea the entire independent press was placed under a government ban and in Zimbabwe the government was linked with bomb attacks and other violence against reporters.

The report noted a rise in the number of murders across Latin America, from seven in 2000 to 11 last year.

The assassination of Costa Rican radio producer, Parmenio Medina Perez, in San Jose was the first murder of a Costa Rican journalist in recent memory. (IPS)