This is Sally…
The security services planned the arrest of the journalist with painstaking care. They bugged her contacts and assembled an elite squad to take her down. On 8 May 2007, eight detectives swarmed into her home and seized her address book, mobile, laptops and bank statements. In a simultaneous raid, a second team searched her newspaper office - going through everything from filing cabinets to boxes of Cup-a-Soup by the office kettle.
Once in custody, detectives kept her isolated from her two teenage daughters and autistic son for 24 hours. Then they began the grilling.
It’s a tale from Stalin’s Russia? No? Mugabe’s Zimbabwe then? Try again.
They let her go, but soon hauled her back in. Before her second interrogation, they left her shivering in a cell. Before her third, a woman officer put on rubber gloves and strip-searched her. After that, ‘I just lost my ability to think coherently,’ Sally Murrer said. ‘My brain went to cotton wool.’
Try Milton Keynes. Sally is a part time journalist who covers the WI and the occasional police story. It’s not a front line, outspoken newspaper and reading that article I am struggling to work out why, exactly, Sally was arrested in the first place, let alone what the charges are or why she needed such brutal treatment. I’m looking for a punchline, or April Fool, or a "Case thrown out for wasting court time." Or something. I don’t get it. What the hell is going on?
To the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’…
*We all live in a terrorist regime, a terrorist regime, a terrorist regime….
‘Tis bloody scary, eh?
*Courtesy of PollyStyrene
Comment by witchy — September 22, 2008 @ 7:51 pm
Heehee, thanks Witchy. Dammit that tune will be going round my head for days now…
It’s scary in a numb, completely don’t get it kinda way. I can’t find the fear over this, just a bewildered confusion. I don’t get it, this doesn’t happen here. Things like this happened in Apartheid South Africa, in Modern Zimbabwe, not bloody Milton Keynes!! It’s unreal.
Comment by SharkBait — September 23, 2008 @ 10:25 am
Well we were threatened with arrest for standing on the pavement on Saturday. Good eh?
Comment by polly styrene — September 25, 2008 @ 12:15 am