| Do Ya Kwashi |
Posted
on 06-Aug-02 08:02 AM
Editors apologised, freed
Post Report
KATHMANDU, Aug 5
Editors of Jana Astha and Jana Prahar weeklies have been set free after less than 24 hours of police custody. According to the police, the two apologised for defamatory and malicious news reports published in their newspapers.
Police said editors Kishor Shrestha of Jana Astha and Bishnu Ghimire of Jana Prahar were released under the supervision of Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) president and the secretary respectively from Kathmandu District Police Office at Hanuman Dhoka and the Lalitpur District Police Office.
Shrestha was picked up from his office by a group of policemen led by a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) and was taken to Hanuman Dhoka Police Station. He was booked for "defamatory" report carried by the newspaper in its last Wednesday’s issue against the Valley Crime Investigation Section’s chief, Ram Chandra Khanal.
Jana Astha sources said the police team misbehaved with Shrestha and other employees before he was taken away in a vehicle parked outside the office. They insisted that Shrestha was picked up in retaliation since it was the weekly which reported that Krishna Sen, editor of Maoist mouthpiece Janadesh, was tortured and killed in government custody. The news about Sen raised national and international furore with the government roundly being condemned. Sen’s current status is still unclear.
Similarly, Ghimire was arrested on complaint that he tried to appropriate a sum of Rs 10,000 from the owner of the National Dance Restaurant in Lalitpur, Manoj Khadka, threatening that he would expose the restaurant owner in his newspaper if he failed to comply with the demand.
According to an Inspector at the Hanuman Dhoka office, Shrestha, in his signed statement, said his weekly in its last Wednesday’s edition, had used "objectionable adjective inadvertently" and admitted that the report has caused mental anguish to Khanal and his family members and expressed apology for it. Shrestha reportedly added that his paper would take care in future as far as the choice of words were concerned.
Similarly, Jana Prahar’s Ghimire was released after he admitted that his weekly’s report about police extorting money from the Lalitpur restaurant was fictitious and agreed to publish written denial in the weekly’s next edition.
Meanwhile, the Federation of Editors and Publishers, Nepal have "strongly objected" to the method used by the police in the episode. Issuing a statement today, the federation said that if any news was wrong or unsatisfactory, then the due process was to get the news refuted by the paper which published it or else the judiciary could be approached on the matter. Instead, it added, the police resorted to arrest and torture and warned the concerned authorities not to provoke the press.
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