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 Matthew Rosenberg, 40, was summoned for questioning on Tuesday
after the newspaper ran a story about officials discussing plans to
form an interim government and "seize power" if a deadlock over the
presidential election failed to break soon.
"Due to the lack of proper accountability and non-cooperation, the
Attorney General's office has decided that Matthew Rosenberg should
leave Afghanistan within 24 hours," the office said in a statement.
"He will not be permitted to enter the country again."
Rosenberg said he and his newspaper had been cooperating fully.
"We simply requested a lawyer as is our right under Afghan law," he
said. "We were also never informed of a formal investigation and we
do not understand how insisting on the right to a lawyer is not
cooperating.”
Afghanistan is in the midst of a ballot that has dragged on for
months, with both candidates claiming victory after the June 14 run
off and allegations of mass fraud threatening to derail the process.
"They had brought us there under the guise of a kind of
semi-informal chat," Rosenberg said of the talks. "It was kind of
polite but insistent that we give them the names of our sources."
Attorney General's office spokesman Basir Azizi said Rosenberg was
being investigated for publishing a story about government officials
conspiring to "seize power" without disclosing the identity of his
sources.
"The report is against our national security because right now, the
election problem is ongoing and talks are at a very intricate
stage," Azizi told Reuters by phone.
The United Nations is supervising an audit of all eight million
votes cast, but the process has proceeded slowly as rival camps
scrutinise each vote.
At the same time, members of a joint-commission appointed by
deadlocked candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani are meeting
to hammer out an agreement on a unity government.
The framework deal was brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry, who has twice flown into Kabul since the run off, but little
progress in fleshing out the structure of the government has been
made since his departure two weeks ago.
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NAI, a group supporting a free press in Afghanistan, said the
expulsion violated laws protecting freedom of expression by the
media.
"We think rather than it being a legal matter, it's a political
game,” said Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, the head of NAI.
"There are people in the government of Afghanistan trying to somehow
keep the international community out of the picture of the elections
in Afghanistan."
Washington criticised the Afghan government's handling of the
situation late on Tuesday, before the Attorney General's statement.
"We are deeply disturbed by the actions of the Afghan attorney
general ... and urge the Afghan government to respect fundamental
freedoms of expression and expression of the press," Marie Harf, a
deputy State Department spokeswoman, told a news briefing in
Washington.
While Afghanistan's press has generally operated freely, the country
has become more dangerous for both journalists and aid workers to
operate.
Earlier this week, consultancy group Humanitarian Outcomes reported
a record number of attacks on aid workers worldwide, with
Afghanistan being the worst place for humanitarian staff to operate.
A string of attacks on journalists in the run-up to the April 5 vote
reflected this trend, with a Swedish-British journalist, an AFP news
agency reporter and a veteran AP news agency photographer being
killed in separate attacks.
(Writing by Jessica Donati; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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