(RSF/IFEX) – Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrest of Haroon Rashid of the BBC World Service’s Urdu-language section and Iqbal Khattak of Pakistan’s “Daily Times” by security forces in the Bajaur Agency tribal zone on 14 January 2006, while the two were covering reactions to a US air strike on a village that was […]
(RSF/IFEX) – Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrest of Haroon Rashid of the BBC World Service’s Urdu-language section and Iqbal Khattak of Pakistan’s “Daily Times” by security forces in the Bajaur Agency tribal zone on 14 January 2006, while the two were covering reactions to a US air strike on a village that was supposedly being visited by Al-Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri.
A total of 18 people were reportedly killed in the air strike but not, apparently, Zawahiri. On 14 January, the authorities also confiscated a video cassette from a cameraman working for the US television news agency APTN, who had just filmed in the village.
“Under what laws were the two Pakistani journalists arrested and the video-cassette seized,” Reporters Without Borders asked. “After a news blackout lasting for months, the civilian and military authorities had at last allowed journalists free access to the Tribal Areas. But when something embarrassing takes place, the press is clearly no longer welcome there.”
Rashid and Khattak were arrested while taking photos of soldiers on the streets of Khar, which is the capital of the Bajaur Agency and lies 60 km north of Peshawar. They were taken to the office of Fahim Wazir, the area’s political administrator, who told them their reporting was contributing to insecurity in the region.
The two journalists refused to let Wazir check the reports they planned to send. Before letting them go, he threatened to ban them from this tribal area.
Meanwhile, there is still no word of Hayatullah Khan, a reporter for the Urdu-language daily “Ausaf” and photographer for the European Press Photo Agency, who has been missing since 5 December 2005, a few days after he produced evidence that contradicted the official account of the death of a leading Arab member of Al-Qaeda, Hamza Rabia, in the North Waziristan section of the Tribal Areas. Rabia was killed by a US missile (see IFEX alerts of 6 January 2006, 21, 16, 9 and 5 December 2005).
