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Taliban expel BBC reporter
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AFGHANISTAN's ruling Taliban militia on Wednesday ordered the closure of the British Broadcasting Corporation's office and gave its foreign correspondent 24 hours to leave the country, officials said.
The militia presented reporter Kate Clark with a letter ordering her to leave Afghanistan for not representing the "realities" of life under the Taliban regime.
The letter said the BBC's coverage of Afghanistan was "away from the existing realities" and told Clark, posted in Kabul in mid-1999, to leave "by Thursday afternoon for the time being".
Nightly BBC broadcasts in the two Afghan national languages of Dari and Pashto have a huge audience among those lucky enough to have radios in the extremely poor country.
The fundamentalist Islamic militia provoked an international outcry two weeks ago when they ordered the destruction of ancient statues to stop idolatry.
A report on BBC radio on Tuesday said it was difficult to find Afghans who agreed with the Taliban's iconoclasm, which saw the destruction of the country's most famous historic monuments, the Bamiyan Buddhas, on Sunday.
The BBC said it "deeply regrets" the order and would "continue to cover Afghanistan from Pakistan and elsewhere".(SD-Agencies)
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