Pulitzer winner Sanna Irshad Mattoo, barred from flying abroad...
Sanna Irshad Mattoo, 28 years old from Srinagar, Kashmir won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. She is one of the four Reuters photojournalists who have received the prestigious award for their second wave of covid coverage in India.
In an interview with the Indian express she said, “It was huge for me, a proud moment for us”. After her graduation from the Central University of Kashmir, she joined the magnum foundation photography and social justice fellow. Mattoo has been covering Kashmir for the past six years and her pictures have been published in international outlets such as Al Jazeera, Time and Caravan. Her achievements even caught the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as they congratulated her.
Mattoo said, “My flight was scheduled on Saturday afternoon. At the immigration, I was put aside and told to wait three hours. I kept on asking the officials about the reasons until I missed the flight”. She said she was later briefed that she cannot fly with no explanation given to her. She told Al Jazeera that officials had asked her to contact Kashmir and find out why she can’t fly as the Kashmiri officials directed her ban.
Mattoo took the matter to twitter as she posted a picture of her passport and tickets stamped with ‘cancelled without prejudice’ and expressed her disappointment.
Journalists all over the nation have criticised her ban calling it ‘disturbing pattern’. The committee to protect Journalists (CPJ) took a stand as they said, “must immediately end its practice of barring Kashmiri journalists from foreign travel”.
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