PARIS, July 23: A Pakistani journalist, Hayatullah Khan, correspondent for The Nation, detained with his two guides and driver, by the US forces in Afghanistan, was freed on July 7.

According to the Paris-based international journalists rights organization Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), Khan was arbitrarily detained for at least four days by US forces in the eastern Afghan province of Paktia.

The RSF has decided to call upon the US government to “investigate the arbitrary detention” of Khan and has stressed in its demand that “soldiers must respect the rights of journalists, even in war zones.”

In a letter to US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, the RSF secretary-general Robert Menard has noted that “as US forces continue to make blunders in Afghanistan regarding civilians, the arrest of a Pakistani journalist Hayatullah Khan is another error in their dealings with journalists.”

And, he adds, “if, as he avers, he was arbitrarily detained and ill-treated, the US government must compensate him.”

According to Vincent Brossel, the RSF’s specialist on Asia- Pacific affairs, Hayatullah Khan “told us that he had set out on July 2 to report on the activities of Al Qaeda and the Taliban along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The next day, he and his team went to a US camp to interview US officers, but as he was showing his ID and press card, he was arrested, handcuffed, and put in a dirty two-square metre cell.

“Without water, blindfolded and his hands tied,” continues Brossel, “he was interrogated by US and British officers who accused him of passing on information to terrorist organizations, notably Al Qaeda, on the basis of names and phone numbers of Afghan and Pakistani religious leaders they found in his address book that they confiscated.”

Faced with the US forces’ accusation, Khan informed the RSF that he replied to his accusers that “they were contacts he needed to do his job as a journalist in the region. I kept denying their charges and repeatedly told them I was a professional journalist.”

“At one point,” reports Brossel, “the soldiers told him he should be ‘ready to die’.”

Khan was finally freed on July 7, reports Brossel, but only after some of the journalist’s press colleagues as well as the RSF Pakistan representative Iqbal Khattak had approached US diplomats in Peshawar who were able, at last, to confirm Khan’s status as a legitimate journalist.

But, notes Brossel, “as soon as he reached the Pakistani border, he was detained once again, this time by Pakistani paramilitary forces who accused him, in turn, of having given the Americans information about the Pakistani army’s movements.”

The RSF also reports that as Khan has developed severe kidney trouble as a result of the five days spent in detention by the US and Pakistani forces.