Foreign journalists trying to conduct interviews in the Sichuan earthquake zone in western China are being attacked and detained as Beijing ratchets up security in preparation for the first anniversary of the devastating quake on May 12.
In separate incidents on Tuesday a Finnish television crew and a Financial Times reporter were attacked near Fuxin number two primary school while trying to interview parents of the 126 children killed when the shoddily built school collapsed in the tremor.
In another incident yesterday, Clifford Coonan, Beijing bureau chief for the Irish Times, was detained by a special police unit for almost an hour for trying to meet parents of hundreds of children who died in another school collapse in the town of Juyuan. He was subsequently released but told that foreign reporters were forbidden from interviewing grieving parents during the “sensitive” period round the anniversary of the earthquake, which killed nearly 90,000 people.