DOHA, Nov 24: Journalists in several Arab capitals on Thursday staged protests over reports that US President George Bush wanted to attack Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera’s Doha headquarters.

Dozens of staff turned out for a symbolic sit-in at the Doha headquarters, with similar protests at the channel’s foreign bureaus.

About 100 of the channel’s journalists and employees have signed a petition calling on its board of governors to launch an official inquiry into the claim, which appeared in Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper.

They also demanded an immediate end ‘to attacks and incitement against Al Jazeera and its employees’ and called for ‘the opening of an inquiry into the bombing of Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul and Baghdad’.

The Daily Mirror reported the existence of a memo which summarized a conversation between Mr Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in which the US president was reported to have wanted to bomb the channel’s headquarters while Mr Blair opposed the idea.

The channel’s director addressed the Doha sit-in from London, telling the gathered workers that he was trying to meet Mr Blair.

“We have requested an urgent meeting with the British prime minister and editors of newspapers and other media in London,” said Wadhah Khanfar.

“We have adopted a plan of action that we have immediately started to implement,” he said, calling for next week to be ‘an Al Jazeera and freedom of expression week’.

“We won’t be quiet until we have reached the truth, which we will make public,” Mr Khanfar added.

Protesters also called for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to intervene ‘to bring the American administration and the British government to explain their attitude in this matter’.—AFP