APEC hosts Indonesia on Monday denied stifling press freedom after withdrawing the credentials of nine Hong Kong journalists for shouting questions at the Philippine leader, insisting that they had posed a security threat.
Despite protests from Hong Kong's main journalist group, President Benigno Aquino's spokesman also said the journalists had "crossed the line" by aggressively questioning him about a hostage siege in Manila that left eight Hong Kong people dead in 2010.
"We deemed it improper for media to act that way, as they didn't talk normally but they were very demonstrative, like they were protesting," Gatot Dewa Broto, the Indonesian communications ministry official who is in charge of the APEC media centre in Bali, told AFP.
"So we did this due to security concerns," he said, adding that the press badges of nine Hong Kong journalists had been deactivated.
continue... http://ph.news.yahoo.com/h-k-journalists-kicked-apec-shouting-aquino-030948616.html
