Pakistan: first-hand account of police attack on journalists/bloggers

"Bolshevik," a blogger for Metroblogging in Pakistan (who I believe happens to be female) wrote an account of being attacked by police and jailed in the course of a rally for press freedoms:

The moment the rally got out of the Press Club, we were attacked (yes, "attacked") by the policemen. There was a LOAD of brutal baton-charging, and one policeman hit ARY's Aajiz Jamali so hard on his back with the shield, that the shield broke in two. :-S Women and men were hit indiscriminately and very VERY brutally -- yes I can emphasize that enough. I'm skinny -- I crawled around and got out unhurt, but a lot of other people were seriously injured. Everyone ran back towards the press club. Some of our office bearers and senior people had been picked up.
We all got out again and demanded that everyone be released. The policemen said they'd let everyone go if we went back inside the press club. We refused, and said we'd go in ONLY after our people were released. Negotiations followed, and it turned out that our people could not be released. We said fine, if you can arrest 10, you can arrest all the rest of us too.

Link (image by Mudsi / thanks, Sean Bonner)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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js7a

Believe me, the link is worth clicking on this one. What an amazing story!
towtansua

(@gmail)

my old translator from when i was in pakistani kashmir recently got arrested and beat up for a couple weeks for a pretty bogus reason.

i’ve met some nice police and military officers though. even the crazy taliban villagers with AK_47′s will offer chai.
ark

The story at the end of that link would be a hell of a more effective if it wasn’t written in the Pakistani equivalent of 12-year-old Valley Girl speak.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Ark: You should write a letter to the Karachi PD, telling them to please limit themselves to attacks on people who write in a straight, sober journalistic style.