Arrests – Journalists

A day before the Press Council of India’s appointed probe committee was going to meet journalists in Kashmir, Mukhtar Zahoor, a stringer with the BBC, was summoned from his home and forced to spend a night in a Srinagar police station.

A PCI team arrived in Srinagar on October 13 to investigate the alleged intimidation and harassment of journalists in Jammu and Kashmir. The team comprised Dainik Bhaskar editor Prakash Dubey, New Indian Express journalist Gurbir Singh and Jan Morcha editor Suman Gupta. When the police summoned Zahoor at midnight, they said they had to ask him a few things. Instead, he was kept in custody for the night. “I couldn’t sleep at all; I was kept thinking about what I may have done wrong,” he told The Wire.

Zahoor said that in the morning he was let go after his questioning was complete. Most questions, he told The Wire, were about his whereabouts on September 1 – the night Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani passed away. “They asked me about the places I visited that day. They checked my phone and also questioned me about my contacts and content I had on my phone,” he said.