Thai authorities have kicked off a probe to determine whether a two-person CNN crew entered the site of Thursday’s daycare massacre illegally after local media posted an image showing the TV news network’s journalists climbing over fencing and police tape surrounding the site of the tragedy.
“Let the process run its course, I don’t want to disclose all the details. Let the police do their work investigating,” local township administration chief Danaichok Boonsom told reporters Sunday.
Separately on Sunday, local media reported that Thai immigration officials had withdrawn the visas of the offending CNN reporters – 47-year-old Anna Coren, an Australian, and 34-year-old Daniel Hodge, a Brit.
The reporters were reportedly escorted by police from their hotel in Udon Thani for questioning about who allowed them onto the crime scene. The deputy chief of police at the Na Klang police station in Nong Bua Lam Phu warned that the pair could be charged with illegal entry onto a crime scene and tampering with evidence, with possible punishment including deportation and blacklisting.
CNN has claimed that its reporters were allowed onto the scene to film their report by three public health officials, and that they entered after police temporarily removed their cordon, but had to climb the fence to get out when the cordon was put back in place.
Jonathan Head, a BBC Southeast Asia correspondent who was also at the scene of the crime, called out CNN, tweeting that he “stopped another media team climbing over the gate trying to get inside the nursery where the terrible killings took place.”
Head called CNN’s coverage, which included “showing blood-stained rooms inside,” “hugely insensitive.”
Local reporters also attacked CNN. “There’s a way to do parachute journalism – but if it’s as non-kosher as it appears to be, this ain’t it. And who usually gets yelled at by officials [who] get angry at these kind of transgressions? Not the parachutes that have left already, but locals like us,” Channel News Asia Thailand correspondent Saksith Saiyasombut tweeted.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand issued a formal statement saying that the CNN team entered the clearly marked crime scene without permission, “no matter what they may claim,” and called the incident an “unprofessional and serious breach of journalistic ethics in crime reporting.”
“It was not a scoop or an example of penetrating reporting because no other news organization, foreign or local, was prepared to behave in this unethical manner, and any one of them could have done so,” the FCCT added.
The group urged CNN to “answer a simple question” – whether its crew would have behaved in a similar manner while covering a similar situation in the United States.
36 people were killed in Thursday’s daycare massacre, among them 24 children, with 12 others injured. Police said they were killed by a 34-year-old former police officer who had been fired for failing a drug test. The attacker later killed his wife and child and claimed his own life. The attack was the worst-ever massacre of its kind in Thai history.