Asia

Home page

Asia

Indian police beat Mexican, Kashmiri photographers

20 August 2011 00:31 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Two photographers, a Mexican and an Indian, said Friday that police detained them for several hours after beating them during a street protest against New Delhi’s rule in the Indian portion of Kashmir, APA reports quoting AP.

Narciso Contreras, who works for California-based Zuma Press, and Showkat Shafi, a stringer with Al-Jazeera English website, said they were attacked in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-held Kashmir, on Friday.

Contreras was being examined by a doctor in a Srinagar hospital following his release. He says government forces charged at protesters and that the photographers got caught in the melee.

Shafi was undergoing treatment at another hospital.

Protests by stone-throwing youths and clashes with government forces have become routine during the summer in Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment runs deep among the mostly Muslim population.

"I ran away after police and soldiers charged at the stone pelters and got trapped inside a tailor’s shop with some protesters. The soldiers descended there and started beating every one, including me," said Contreras.

"Later they took me to a police station. I repeatedly told them I’m a foreign journalist but they continued beating me as if I was some criminal," he said, adding that their behavior changed after he identified himself.

Shafi said he was taking pictures when paramilitary soldiers caught him and beat him mercilessly. "They took away my camera and paraded me to the police station where I was kept in a lockup for about five hours."

Doctors said the photographers received bruises all over their bodies.

Showkat Ahmed, a police officer, said the two were detained along with some protesters. "But we freed the two after their identification." He denied that the two were beaten by the police.

The Kashmir Press Photographers Association condemned the attack on the photographers and demanded an independent probe.

"Let’s remember that incidents like these have become a routine here. Police rarely allow us to discharge our professional duties," said Farooq Khan, the association president.

Since 1989, a violent, separatist insurgency and the ensuing crackdown by Indian forces have killed an estimated 68,000 people, mostly civilians. The armed rebellion has largely been suppressed, but resistance is now principally through streets protests.