[Nettime-bold] 50 hours

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

Journalists are often detained as spies or terrorists in various rogue 
regimes. A couple of days ago an associate from Belgrade's B92, 
here as a tourist, was arrested and detained for 50 hours for being 
in a party of 5 people, 3 of which (but not him) jumped over a fence. 
Eventually, they were charged with criminal tresspassing and are 
due to appear in court on July 22nd. Apparently, they wanted to 
take a picture of the Statue of Liberty...

...and the fence was in Brooklyn, and the arresting officers were 
NYPD, not Belgrade police. They were interrogated by FBI, since 
they were obvious terrorists: young male foreigners, with cameras 
and attitude. FBI asked them whether they knew how to fly an 
airplane (no), whether they were Muslims (no, they were Serbs, 
which is perhaps as non-Muslim as you can go unless you want to 
be an Israeli), and other pertinent questions. Finally, prosecutor 
asked for a $10,000 bail to be set, which the judge, fortunatelly for 
the sake of sanity, laughingly dismissed.

ivo

ps - Since, obviously, the NYPD has plenty of time to waste on 
frivolous cases, I hope they shall make progress on some more 
real crimes, like the backpack that was stolen from me on Tuesday 
with all my credit cards, cell phone, documents and a quantity of 
private and to me dear property.



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