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Expelled US 'journalist' violated visa terms
A freelance American journalist who was expelled from Pakistan had gone to the country as a research scholar and not as a journalist, and violated his visa terms, an embassy official said. Nicholas Schmidle accused Pakistani authorities of expelling him because of his exposure of Taliban extremist elements operating in the country. In an article in the Washington Post on Sunday, Schmidle writes that he was summarily expelled from Pakistan, linking his expulsion with the travels and reporting I had done for a story published two days earlier in the New York Times magazine about a dangerous new generation of Taliban in Pakistan. He states that he had spent several months travelling throughout the troubled areas along the border with Afghanistan including Quetta, Dera Ismail Khan, and Swat. He adds that his visa listed no travel restrictions, and less than a week earlier, the president had told foreign journalists in Islamabad that they could go anywhere they wanted to in Pakistan. An embassy official asked to comment on Schmidles claim said that he went to Pakistan more than two years ago as a research scholar and was attached to a local organisation in Islamabad. He did not go to Pakistan as a journalist, neither freelance nor one attached to a news organisation. Journalists, the official stressed, require a different category of visa, which Schmiddle did not have. He was also travelling in areas, as he himself confesses in his article, where even foreign journalists would need permission for the sake of their own safety. As such his forays into those areas were totally unauthorised and in violation of the terms of his visa, the official added. Posted by: Fred 2008-02-04 |
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