Police prevented two Dutch correspondents from entering Dujiangyan, Sichuan province, on June 4, and later barred them from a collapsed middle school where parents had been congregating since the earthquake.
The reporters for Elsevier and Radio Netherlands were turned back at a police checkpoint leading into Dujiangyan. Police told the reporters they couldn’t enter the city because “the situation was very fierce.” Police then told the journalists’ driver if he persisted in trying to enter Dujiangyan they would record his license number and car details and it would “cause problems” for him.
The journalists proceeded to enter the city via a back road, but were unable to visit the grounds of the Juyuan middle school due to a police barricade. An official from the local Foreign Affairs Office approached the journalists and told them reports of foreign journalists being detained a day earlier were “just false rumors,” and said the authorities knew nothing of attempts by parents to petition at the courthouse.
Journalist Ole Torp and a cameraman for Norwegian Broadcasting were chased away from the Juyuan Middle School and a primary school in Dujiangyan, Sichuan province, first by plainclothes officers then, a day later, by armed police who seemed to be “in full battle gear,” said Torp.
Earlier, the local foreign affairs office had issued expired press credentials to the journalists, saying that it’d run out of current press passes and that credentials which had expired several days earlier were still valid.
In contrast to the police who chased the team away from two Dujiangyan schools: in one case while the journalists were interviewing a dead student’s bereaved grandfather — Torp said several younger local police officers were “almost demonstratively
sympathetic” to the journalists for telling the world about the post-earthquake situation. Those officers allowed filming, but asked the crew to hurry.
