KASARGOD: Mangaluru City police on Friday illegally detained seven journalists from Kerala for seven hours and let them off after the chief minister’s office intervened.The journalists were reporting from Mangaluru’s Wenlock Government Hospital, where the bodies of two slain protesters were brought for postmortem examination.The journalists said they were picked up while they were interviewing the relatives of Nausin, 23 and Jalil Kudroli, 49 -- who were killed in police firing during a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) at Bunder in Mangaluru on Thursday.
The detained journalists were Mujeeb Rahman and Pratheesh Kapoth of Asianet News; Anand Kottila and Ranju GnF of 24News; Shabeer and Aneesh K K of MediaOne; and Sumesh M, cameraman of News 18. The journalists were incommunicado for seven hours from 8.30 am as the police took away their mobile phones. “We were going live from the hospital when police commissioner P S Harsha asked us to go out of the compound. Once we were out, he asked for our ID cards and pushed us inside a police bus,” said reporter Anand Kottila.
The MediaOne team was picked up from another location, and the police forced them to sit on the floor of the bus and did not allow them to talk to anybody. “We were treated like criminals for doing our job,” said Mujeeb Rahman, an accredited journalist.Anand said they started reporting from 6.30 am. “All we had was a glass of water in the morning. After that, till we were let off at 3.30 pm, we were not offered food or water,” he said.The journalists from Kerala said there was no bar on reporters from other states. Police impounded the vehicles of Asianet News and MediaOne and were yet to return it.
After Thursday’s police firing on protesters, Mangalore police commissionerate imposed curfew in its limits covering Ullal, Surathkal, Moodbidri and Mulky till December 22 midnight. Mobile internet services have been suspended in Dakshina Kannada district till Saturday night. When colleagues in Kasaragod could not contact the journalists in Mangaluru, Kasaragod Press Club president Mohammed Hasheem got in touch with the office of the Chief Minister in Thiruvananthapuram.
The CMO directed the chief secretary to ensure the release of the journalists, said Hasheem. “We were assured by the government that the journalists will be freed soon but they were released only after seven hours,” said Hasheem. “The illegal detention amounted to gagging the media,” he said. The Mangaluru police dropped them off at Talapady, on the border of Kasaragod and Dakshina Kannada.Meanwhile, in Kasaragod, journalists took out a march to the head post office to protest against the detention of their colleagues on Friday.