A French reporter accused of spying after entering Afghanistan illegally last week would receive no leniency, a Pakistani newspaper yesterday quoted a ruling Taliban official as saying.
The Pakistani daily, The News, said one of its reporters met Michel Peyrard, who works for Paris Match magazine, in his detention cell in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. It did not specify when the meeting took place.
"We have recovered certain machines and documents from Michel Peyrard which showed he may be on a spying mission," Mullah Taj Meer, Taliban intelligence chief for Nangarhar province, of which Jalalabad is the capital, was quoted as saying.
"We won't show leniency in this case as we did earlier when we released British female journalist Yvonne Ridley on compassionate grounds," he added.
Peyrard, 44, was arrested on Oct. 9 near Jalalabad after entering the country disguised under a head-to-toe Muslim woman's veil, or burqa. He was charged with spying, an offence punishable by death, and told he would be tried.
Ridley, from Britain's Sunday Express, was released after 10 days in Taliban detention on Oct. 8, the day after US-led strikes on Afghanistan began.
Two Pakistani journalists, Irfan Qureshi and Mukarram Khan, who had accompanied Peyrard, had also been charged with spying and were being held in the same complex, the newspaper said.
Qureshi, who worked for The Statesman newspaper in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, had previously been warned by the Taliban against attempting to smuggle foreign journalists across the porous border into Afghanistan, it said.
Peyrard was quoted as saying he decided to take the risk and enter Afghanistan, which is off-limits to foreign reporters, after being refused a visa by the ruling Taliban.
"My disguise didn't work ...," he said. "It wasn't the first time I took such a risk. In the past I entered Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya illegally in my quest for some adventurous journalism."
But he said he wanted to get back to work and not remain cooped up in a cell, the newspaper reported.
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