This:
BERLIN - Several foreign news organisations complained Sunday that Iranian authorities were blocking their reporters from covering protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election.Smooth move guys! It's not anybody is going to notice the BBC going down or anything - and it doesn't look at all suspicious that you're shutting down foreign media at the same time your claiming you just won a fixed election. Real smooth.
German public television channels ZDF and ARD said their reporters were not allowed to broadcast their reports, while the BBC said the signals of its Persian services were being jammed from Iran.
The Dubai-based Arab news channel Al-Arabiya in Tehran was forbidden from working for a week and Dutch broadcaster Nederland 2 said its journalist and cameraman were arrested and ordered to leave the country.
Foreign media converged in Iran to cover Friday’s presidential election, whose official result sparked violent protests in Tehran after Ahmadinejad was declared the winner by a landslide.
Violence erupted for a second day on Sunday as supporters of Ahmadinejad’s closest challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi clashed with riot police. Mousavi denounced the election as a fraud and called for the vote to be annulled.
The editors in chief of German public television channels ZDF and ARD sent a letter to the Iranian ambassador in Berlin accusing Iranian authorities of barring their reporters from doing their work.
ARD correspondent Peter Mezger can no longer leave his hotel while ZDF journalist Halim Hosny and his colleagues have not been allowed to report on the events, their chief editors wrote.
“We see a breach of freedom of the press and democratic principles,” their editors said in their letter.
Iranian authorities had already barred the journalists from filming and broadcasting their images in recent days, the editors said.
ARD and ZDF insisted that they would “continue to report on the events in Iran” in a “critical, fair and independent” manner.
“We would have liked to broadcast the story of our correspondent Halim Hosny, but the Iranian authorities forbade journalists from working,” ZDF said in its nightly news programme.
The British Broadcasting Corporation said the satellites it uses for its Persian television and radio services had been affected since Friday by “heavy electronic jamming” which had become “progressively worse.”
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