Pakistan's biggest news channels shut down

Pakistani journalists and human rights activists protest in Islamabad yesterday. Several hundred journalists staged a noisy protest outside TV station Geo's office in Islamabad after private Pakistani television news channels broadcasting out of Dubai, Geo and ARYOne, were shut down amid pressure from military ruler Pervez Musharraf, the networks said. Photo: AFP

Two leading private Pakistani television news channels broadcasting out of Dubai have been shut down amid pressure from military ruler Pervez Musharraf, the networks said yesterday.
Geo and ARYOne had been blacked out on cable here since November 3, when Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, but had still been available on satellite and the Internet until Friday night when they were fully closed.
Both channels said the government had been pushing them to stop showing their political talkshows.
"We have been asked to shut down our transmission from Friday midnight," Kamran Khan, a senior official at Geo who hosts a popular talk show on the channel, told AFP.
After the shutdown, Geo showed a continuous animated loop of its blue and orange logo, inscribed with the motto "Live and Let Live."
At first resting on a tranquil sea, the logo is then shown being battered in an intense storm. The words flash up "Please inform them."
Hamid Mir, another senior journalist at Geo, told AFP that the network's employees would now hold protests, adding: "We will continue to protest until all of us are arrested."
"We were told at 9.30pm in Dubai that our transmission uplink would be shut down, as soon as we finished my talk show "Capital Talk" in which we were discussing police maltreating Imran Khan's sister during a protest," he said.
Mir said the closure came after Musharraf spoke to Dubai's ruler to ask for the channels to be taken off air. The claim could not be immediately verified.
Imran Khan, a former cricket legend and a leading opposition figure, is currently detained by government and charged under the anti-terrorism act for opposing emergency rule.