Female Kosovo Journalist Targeted by ‘Evil’ Online Threats
N1 Television correspondent Zana Cimili, who was threatened with murder on social media by an anti-Albanian nationalist, told BIRN that journalists must challenge attacks on media freedom and keep on reporting the news.
“This person’s words were so calculated, so evil. That’s why this time it genuinely made me feel threatened and scared,” Zana Cimili told BIRN.
On July 5, regional television network N1 announced that Cimili, the channel’s prominent reporter from Kosovo, had received death threats online.
The anonymous person who made the threats said in their message that they had “a lifelong desire to kill an Albanian, even an Albanian child”.
The message also expressed the desire “for a new war in Kosovo during which the Albanians will feel Serbian rage”, N1 reported.
“The threats to Zana Cimili, as to other N1 journalists, are not only threats to the individual reporters but also to freedom of speech and of the media as fundamental democratic rights,” said the channel, which has reporters in countries across the former Yugoslavia.
A day later, Serbian police arrested a man from the northern town of Becej on suspicion of threatening Cimili. A court then placed the suspect under house arrest.
“The arrest of the man who threatened me and my daughter sends an important message – that you cannot assume to hide behind the guise of social media when threatening journalists,” Cimili said in an interview with BIRN conducted via email.
The shock for Cimili was heightened by the intensity of the hatred directed at Albanians, and the fact that the perpetrator posted the message under a picture of her three-year-old daughter – “posting it under a photograph of her playing in the sand – saying they would ‘rip up Albanian children with their teeth’”.
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