The Pakistani government has introduced curbs on international media in the garrison town where Osama bin Laden was killed, ordering television stations to cease broadcasting and some reporters to leave town.
On Saturday night the television regulator, Pemra, ordered nine international channels, including the BBC, CNN and Fox, to stop “illegal” broadcasts from Abbottabad, where Bin Laden’s house has been the subject of intense media coverage
It suggested the channels could not broadcast from Abbottabad or anywhere in Pakistan without obtaining a licence, a previously unknown requirement. Simultaneously, government officials contacted several British, Australian and American journalists, instructing them to leave Abbottabad because their visas did not permit them to stay.
The government also took measures to stop more journalists entering Pakistan. At diplomatic missions in London and New Delhi, Pakistani officials said there was a temporary hold on media visas.
The measures appeared to be part of a concerted government effort to stem a tide of critical media coverage over thorny questions about how Bin Laden lived for up to six years in a garrison town that is home to three regiments, a military academy and thousands of soldiers.
Implementation, however, has been haphazard. The BBC foreign editor, Jon Williams, said the station had not received the government letter instructing it to quit broadcasting, and a BBC reporter in Pakistan said operations were continuing as normal.
But a Channel 4 journalist said the station had been told to return to Islamabad and seek permission to work in Abbottabad. The broadcaster’s crew left at lunchtime on Sunday.
Until now most Western criticism has been directed at Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies. Some US officials have insinuated that the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) helped to harbour Bin Laden.
Now the ISI is hitting back with judicious media leaks. In a move bound to infuriate the US, on Friday several Pakistani television stations named the CIA station chief in Islamabad as Mark Carlton; the stations said he had been given a verbal roasting by the ISI chief, General Shuja Pasha.
Wild goose chases
The naming is sensitive because the previous CIA chief in Islamabad quit his position over security worries last December after being named in a court case and the national media. Some US officials blamed the ISI for the leak.
The military’s other weapon in the media war has been leaked accounts of life with Bin Laden from his surviving wives and children, who are believed to be in military custody near the general headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Bin Laden’s 12-year-old daughter, named as Safiya, reportedly told Pakistani investigators that she saw her father being shot by US forces. Local media have reprinted a copy of the passport of one of Bin Laden’s wives, 29-year-old Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, a citizen of Yemen, although some versions of the image appear to have been digitally altered.
Other leaks have sent journalists on apparent wild goose chases. On Saturday the New York Times and the Pakistani paper Dawn, quoting Pakistani officials, said Sadah had claimed that Bin Laden lived for two and a half years in a small north-western village before moving to Abbottabad in 2005.
The news triggered a media stampede to Chak Shah Mohammad, near Abbottabad, where journalists discovered a hamlet of a few hundred houses and about 2 000 inhabitants with no internet or telephone connection. But at the time there was little sign of Bin Laden. Most houses were small, mud-brick dwellings, while the only one with high walls was that of the local mullah and still under construction.
As reporters swarmed the village, shops sold out of bottled water, one school closed for the day, and the villagers denied any connection with the Saudi. Some wondered whether there was a connection between a local cave complex and Tora Bora, Bin Laden’s hideout in late 2001. “Bora means cave. So yes, both places have caves,” one elder laconically told the Daily Times newspaper. “Will we be bombed now?”
– guardian.co.uk