The Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday welcomed the NIA court’s judgement acquitting photojournalist Kamran Yousuf of the charges of receiving terror funding.
The authorities failed to prove any of the allegations initially made against the journalist.
New York based CPJ said that Yousuf, who spent six months in prison, should never have been charged.
Yousuf, a freelance photojournalist from India’s Jammu and Kashmir was falsely implicated in 2017 charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy. Jailed for six months in Tihar, he was the first Kashmiri journalist booked under draconian UAPA.
Yousuf has been at the receiving end of violence and harassment by the government forces.
Yousuf was picked up from his home by the police in the middle of the night on Feb 2020. He was taken in a police vehicle to the office of DYSP and questioned about some twitter account run by Kamran Manzoor. Suspecting him to be the owner of the twitter account they checked his phone and after failing to find anything that they were looking for, the police official let him go at 1 pm in the dead of night.
Half a year later, on September 2020, Yousuf and another journalist from Kashmir was brutally beaten up by the Jammu and Kashmir Police while covering an ongoing encounter between militants and security forces in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district.
