KABUL, Dec 20: A journalist for the Arabic-language network Al Jazeera said on Friday he and a colleague were detained and roughed up by troops from the multinational force in Kabul as they tried to report on a grenade attack on its base.

Sayed Hashmatolla Moslih, a producer and cameraman of Afghan origin who holds Australian citizenship, said he and a local journalist employed by Qatar-based Al Jazeera were manhandled on Thursday by troops from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) who were apparently Dutch.

Moslih said the two went to Camp Warehouse, ISAF’s main base, only after the road was reopened following the grenade attack, in which three Afghans, including the assailant, were killed. Two French nationals were injured.

“We showed them our press cards. I had my Australian passport,” Moslih said.

“We were put in the back of a truck, blindfolded, our hands tied tight by plastic,” he said.

They were driven into the camp and “I was thrown head first out of the truck.”

“We were interrogated for six hours. I asked for them to loosen my wrists; I couldn’t feel my hands. They refused.”

“They were asking, ‘What do you know about (Osama) bin Laden? Is your (Afghan) colleague a Taliban?’”

He said a Romanian military policeman told him the soldiers who roughed him up were Dutch members of ISAF.

A spokesman for ISAF, a 22-nation force that has patrolled Kabul for the past year, said he could not confirm Moslih’s account.

“We have had no report of any such incident,” Colonel Samet Oz told reporters.

Several journalists complained that ISAF troops were hostile to the press after the attack, pushing some of the journalists and threatening to confiscate their material.—AFP