Four reporters were detained by police over the weekend for probing the plane crash in Yichun, Heilongjiang Province, the Beijing News Reported Sunday.
A group of reporters from 10media outlets protested outside the funeral home and demanded the reporters' freedom. |
Police stationed near a Yichun funeral home detained four reporters, who are from Chinese Business Morning, Legal Mirror and CBNweekly, on Saturday where relatives of the people that died in the crash came to view the bodies.
Police held Shang Qinshuo, a reporter for CBNweekly, on Saturday morning for about two hours while he was trying to interview victims' families at the funeral home.
"Two police came to me and asked if I am a reporter; I said 'yes,' and then they asked me to go with them without telling me why," Shang told the Global Times.
After being taken to an office inside the funeral home along with another female reporter, Lin Chenyin of the Legal Mirror, Shang was told that the families didn't want to be bothered.
The two were released two hours later without charge or explanation after a group of reporters from 10media outlets protested outside the funeral home and demanded the reporters' freedom.
Photographer Wang Shuntian, from the Chinese Business Morning, encountered the same harassment without even taking out his camera 50 meters away from the guard line in front of the funeral home after he identified himself as a reporter to the police.