50 hours
Ivo Skoric
ivo at reporters.net
Sat Jul 13 06:00:53 CEST 2002
Journalists are often detained as spies or terrorists in various rogue
regimes. A couple of days ago an associate from Belgrade's B92,
here as a tourist, was arrested and detained for 50 hours for being
in a party of 5 people, 3 of which (but not him) jumped over a fence.
Eventually, they were charged with criminal tresspassing and are
due to appear in court on July 22nd. Apparently, they wanted to
take a picture of the Statue of Liberty...
...and the fence was in Brooklyn, and the arresting officers were
NYPD, not Belgrade police. They were interrogated by FBI, since
they were obvious terrorists: young male foreigners, with cameras
and attitude. FBI asked them whether they knew how to fly an
airplane (no), whether they were Muslims (no, they were Serbs,
which is perhaps as non-Muslim as you can go unless you want to
be an Israeli), and other pertinent questions. Finally, prosecutor
asked for a $10,000 bail to be set, which the judge, fortunatelly for
the sake of sanity, laughingly dismissed.
ivo
ps - Since, obviously, the NYPD has plenty of time to waste on
frivolous cases, I hope they shall make progress on some more
real crimes, like the backpack that was stolen from me on Tuesday
with all my credit cards, cell phone, documents and a quantity of
private and to me dear property.
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