Reuters: News agency protests over Chinese police beating

Tuesday June 26, 8:54 PM

BEIJING (Reuters) - The U.S. embassy and an international news agency lodged protests with China's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday after a photographer was beaten by police while covering a Three Tenors concert in the Forbidden City.

Stephen Shaver, an American photographer with the Agence France-Presse (AFP), was punched in the head and ribs, knocked over and dragged along the ground while taking photographs before Saturday's concert, staged to promote Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Olympics, AFP said.

The allegation raises question marks over Chinese officials' pledge to allow the thousands of reporters who would descend on Beijing for the Olympics the freedom to report wherever and whatever they like.

Half a dozen plainclothes and uniformed police officers attacked Shaver after he took a picture of a lone protester detained by police in front of the venue, AFP said.

He was released but assaulted again when leaving the concert by a group of policemen including one of those involved in the initial incident, it said.

"AFP strongly protests the violence inflicted on one of its photographers in the exercise of his duty and demands an explanation from the relevant authorities," AFP Asia-Pacific Regional Director Pierre Lesourd said in a letter to the Foreign Ministry.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy said U.S. diplomats had made a verbal protest to the Foreign Ministry and asked for an investigation into the reporter's allegations.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue warned reporters not to use the case to undermine Beijing's Olympic bid.

"This is an isolated case," she told a regular news conference. "This has nothing to do with China's bid to host the Olympic Games."

However, the Paris-based press rights group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) said in a statement it had written to International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch to protest working conditions of foreign reporters in Beijing.

"Violence, arrests, pressures, tailing and threats are the daily lot of the foreign correspondent," the statement quoted RSF General Secretary Robert Menard as saying.

RSF asked Samaranch to publicly condemn the alleged attack.

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