"Charging a Kashmiri journalist under the Official Secrets Act in
present circumstances would seem an effort to intimidate any media
which tries to report independently on the conflict in the province,"
said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard in a
letter to Indian interior minister Lal Krishna Advani.

Calling on him to explain the arrest and charging of Geelani, who is
New Delhi bureau chief of the Indian daily Kashmir Times and also
correspondent for the Pakistani daily The Nation, he said the case
against the journalist was "weak."

He also asked the minister to make a speedy inquiry into the
beating-up of another Kashmiri journalist by Indian police who, he
said, "seem incapable of putting a stop to a wave of physical attacks
and attempts to kill journalists in Kashmir. It would be regrettable
if the government allowed the climate of impunity enjoyed by these
attackers to increase," he added.

Geelani was charged today under the secrets act and police were
granted a further five days to hold him for questioning. He was
arrested on 9 June at his New Delhi home by tax department officers
and police but was then accused of storing information in his laptop
computer about India's military presence in Kashmir. He pointed out
that this material was from a 1997 US State Department report and had
already been published in the Indian daily The Hindu.

The daily Hindustan Times said the journalist had admitted to his
interrogators that he worked for Pakistani intelligence but this has
not been confirmed by other sources. Many Kashmiri journalists, as
well as the New Delhi journalists' union, have condemned his arrest,
which came soon after the detention of his father-in-law, Kashmiri
leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who has been charged under an
anti-terrorist law and accused of being in the pay of Pakistani
intelligence.

Another Kashmiri journalist, Mohammad Yusuf Dar, a reporter for the
Daily Excelsior in Jammu (Kashmir), was beaten and insulted by police
and detained for two hours on 10 June. The independent
English-language daily Kashmir Images said he was arrested on his way
home.

Police have still not made any serious investigation into the attempt
to kill Zafar Iqbal, of Kashmir Images, who was shot and seriously
wounded by masked men at his office in Srinagar on 29 May. His
colleagues told Reporters Without Borders that police had made no
effort to guard the paper's offices and made no inquiry into the
shooting.