The Enforcement Directorate raid on Newsclick, an online news portal, has entered the third-day, close to eighty hours, as various groups rue curtailment of press freedom.
In a fresh statement, Newsclick informed that the raid at Editor-in-Chief Prabir Purkayastha’s residence continues while Prabir Purkayastha and author Githa Hariharan have been detained in their house since the beginning of the raid.
The newsportal also expressed concern towards the reports in some of the media outlets based on information allegedly provided by senior officers of the Enforcement Directorate (ED). The statement read: “The selective leak of misleading facts is nothing but a malicious attempt to smear the image of Newsclick and discredit our journalism. It also constitutes a violation of the sanctity of the legal and investigative process.”
Earlier, few media outlets quoted unnamed sources in ED claiming that NewsClick had received 10 crore rupees under Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from an American company.
In an earlier issued editorial statement on 10 February, they had said that “these raids appear to be part of a trend of deploying government agencies against those who refuse to toe the establishment’s line”.
