Ash-har Qarashi is a reporter for the Al Jazeera Chicago Bureau. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for CNN in Islamabad, an investigative reporter for CBS affiliate KCTV in Kansas City, and producer and multimedia correspondent for Chicago public television station WTTW and the Chicago News Cooperative and then for Chicago Tonight. He was in the Al Jazeera film crew that was targeted by Ferguson police as part of the media blackout.
While covering the protests in Ferguson, police explicitly targeted Al Jazeera, sending a tear canister right into a live shot:
After Qurashi and other Al Jazeera crew were forced to leave the scene by the tear gas, police came and dismantled Al Jazeera camera equipment:
tweet from Guardian reporter Jon Swaine [source]
@ashhar_quraishi => his twitter has more pictures.
"Al Jazeera America is stunned by this egregious assault on freedom of the press that was clearly intended to have a chilling effect on our ability to cover this important story," the network's Jocelyn Austin said. "We believe that this situation must be investigated along with those involving our colleagues at other media outlets."
- Ferguson Police Use Tear Gas On Al Jazeera America Team - Huffington Post
Previously, Ash-har Qarashi was named in an ACLU lawsuit against the NSA for illegal wiretapping:
"Emily Whitfield, the ACLU’s Media Relations Director, ... communicated by email with Ash-har Qurashi, Cable News Network’s correspondent in Pakistan;"
