Pak. newspaper raided

By B. Muralidhar Reddy

ISLAMABAD, SEPT. 28 In a reflection of Pakistan's military Government's growing impatience with the press, an army monitoring team raided the headquarters of the Dawn Group of publications in Karachi on Wednesday.

The ostensible purpose of the raid, carried out alongwith a group of engineers from the Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation (KESC), was to test `all the existing electric installations' on the premises, but the management denounced it as a `punitive raid' to `browbeat' the paper.

In a statement after the four-hour-long operation, the management said the raid was ``perhaps the administration's way of indicating what lies ahead for the remnants of a besieged free press in Pakistan''. The Dawn management has decided to send a report to human rights and civil rights organisations within and outside Pakistan. It may lodge a protest with both the military and the civilian authorities in Islamabad and Karachi.

The Dawn group, which publishes the prestigious English daily, Dawn, and several other publications, is considered one of the most objective and independent newspaper chain in Pakistan. The Musharraf Government has not been exactly happy with some of the recent reports in some of the publications of the group.

In one of his press conferences in New York recently, Gen. Musharraf came down heavily on the print media journalists in Pakistan and said they deserved to be `stifled 10 times over' for some of their irresponsible reporting.

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Section  : International
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