Bangladeshi TV reporter attacked awaiting for justice
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the authorities in Bangladesh’s southwestern city of Khulna to arrest those responsible for attacking a TV reporter and his cameraman when they visited a construction site on 5 January. The authorities must also investigate why the reporter was arrested after the attack, RSF said.
When Ekattor TV’s Khulna bureau chief, Rakib Uddin Pannu, went with a cameraman to the site where a Chinese company is building a water treatment plant, they were harassed and attacked by employees and workers, who damaged their camera.
Their assailants then asked a traffic police officer who was at the construction site to arrest Pannu. Although there were no apparent grounds for detaining him, the policeman complied, taking him to police station. A protest by fellow journalists helped to get him released a few hours later.
“Arresting a reporter when he had just been the victim of an attack is grotesque,” RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk said. “We call on the local authorities to investigate this police blunder and to prosecute those responsible for this unacceptable attack.”
Pannu had gone to the site to do a story about the Bangladeshi government’s contract with a Chinese company for the construction of a major water treatment plant.
Bangladesh is ranked 150th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index.
Bangladesh
