By IANS
Dhaka : Bangladesh’s first and only 24-hour news channel, CSB, has gone off air after a team of telecom regulators visited the office and suspended its frequency allocation.
The closure came abruptly Thursday at around 6.30 p.m., New Age newspaper reported Friday. The move is seen as a possible fallout of its telecasts of the Aug 20-23 demonstrations and violent clashes in Dhaka University and other campuses across the country, demanding an end to emergency rule.
Focus Multimedia Group, the company that owns the private TV channel, said in a statement that four officials of Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) along with security personnel entered the CSB office and shut down transmission.
BTRC also issued a show cause notice asking CSB to explain within seven working days the details of its frequency allocation.
CSB News started commercial broadcasting from the second week of April 2007, but officials alleged that it was done on the basis a forged letter.
CSB, along with another private channel ETV, had been served a notice Aug 23, alleging “breaching of emergency rules”.
The government’s Press Information Department said the two TV stations had aired “provocative news, video footage and talk shows against the government for the last few days”.
Meanwhile, the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) said in a statement to the sixth session of the UN Human Rights Council: “The officers of the armed forces monitor television news bulletins and newspapers and threaten and intimidate editors by phone or in person.
“Television channels have stopped broadcasting many of their issue-based discussions and talk show programmes and newspapers are also engaged in heavy self-censorship. The media now only publish items that the government will like.”
A large number of grassroots level newspapers have reportedly been ordered to close indefinitely, said ALRC, an international human rights watchdog.