Just this February I exchanged a few emails with Curt Hopkins form Committee to Protect Bloggers. I wrote to him that the state of freedom of speech in the Hungarian blogoshpere seems to be in a really good shape and I don’t really know Bloggers who got into trouble. I came across something lately that makes me wonder if I was right. I have found very little information about it, but I try to compile the picture anyway. And my intention is not to cry wolf, please keep that in mind while reading as there are still a lot of missing puzzle pieces!

I regularly read a blog called Police. A policeman was writing anonymously, but seemingly quite honestly about their life in ranks and was answering the questions of the audience in an intelligent and interesting way. Although he was pointing out some negative aspects also, for me it was a great way to learn more about policeman, their work, there work environment and problems. The style told to me that it is not a marketing campaign of the Hungarian Police, still I think this was the best marketing campaign for the police ever.

About a week ago, the blog was shut down, without any prior notice. The opening page you find right now at Police Blog says that after the deletion of the blog, somewhat re-registered it just to make sure noone takes it for a wrong reason. This mysterious “Mister.Y” has an email address listed as a chance for Police to claim his blog space back there.

I’m not an investigative journalist, but I become curious what could have happened. So I wrote to Mister.Y and asked if they new anything what have happened to Police. The answer said “I don’t know what could have happened to him. Maybe he is simply got scared or just jumped out for a while. Or maybe he just gets his blog ready at another site.”

Well, from above the those points the only one that made sense to me is the scared part. If he would just want a little pause or transfer the blog to another place the way to start that is not by erasing it suddenly, without any prior notice to the readers.

Some suspect that the main stream media attention that the blog got recently (at the end of February) might have been what got him in trouble. I found at least one article in a yellow press daily called Esti Hírlap. [Henrik’s note: The following link points to a site which hosts – as all yellow press do – some pictures of nudity, if you don’t want to see that don’t click!] They write about the same issue as he was writing about and the journalist ends with the statement: “I’m reading www.police.freeblog.hu for a long time know, where an active policemen gives us a glance at his everyday life. The stories are staggering, if not even shaking.”
Also Pollner sent me [thanks again] a link to another media piece from a commercial Hungarian radio (InfoRadio). The article starts as: “The institution of police is bleeding from more wounds – writes an assumed policeman in a blog. The Internet diary reveals many things, which makes their everyday life more difficult.”

Police was also writing in an online forum, lets go and see if the post are still there. And they are. In the main thread there are worries about the missing blog and the possible reason. Some even talk about a rumor that he was took into custody, but most of the people don’t dare to believe it. The only thing for sure is that noone seems to know anything for sure. Or at least those who know don’t tell it. Based on the posts about the missing blog I can only estimate that the time of taking down was on the 7th of March.

So the next thing I tried to do is finding posts that talk about the vanishing. And I was shocked. Although there are many people seemed to be concerned about Police, still I only found two personal entries which could relate to this! One of them seems to know Police personally. But know others write about this (or maybe Google failed me miserably). I’m surprised because I think if we want to know more about this we have to direct attention to this. There is no other way we can get information, but by claiming it.

Here are the two brief statements I found.
One was written right on the day when the blog seemed to have vanished (7th of March) from someone (Loydi) obviously knowing Police. The entry is about lots of things, these few lines are at the end of the first paragraph:
“At Nyugati square we waited for an hour for Police, with whom we would have had a meeting scheduled for 10 at the rotating clock, but as he did not arrived by 11, we went into some pizzeria instead to have breakfast and to warm up as we were freezing. I don’t know what could have happened to Police, he is unreachable via phone all day and his blog interestingly is erased either by Freeblog or by himself, although I consider that latter option unlikely. Anyway I hope nothing happened to him and he will show up by evening.”

I found no further evidence on Loydi’s blog about Police showing up. A little connecting piece is that Loydi had a brief statement on the 9th of March that his blog received quite a lot of hits that day and one of the commenting visitors wrote that the reason for that possibly is that people are looking for info on where Police might have gone.

The other entry I found is from a blog called Énmagam [in English: MeMyself], where the author writes a brief statement in the second half of this long entry posted on the 9th of March:
“I just got to know that Police is missing and his blog is erased as well. He is inaccessible and they are investigating after him There is absolutely no information on where he could have been.” [Henrik’s note: from the context it is not clear to me whether the reference to the investigation is for the friends and readers trying to find him or the police].

So to sum it up: I’m confused and don’t know what to think about this. I will certainly keep an eye on the story and post any new info if I found something out. If any of you have any suggestions on how to go forward please don’t hold back, that is what the comment section is for. And if you are a Hungarian reader with a blog, spread the news as I wrote above I think this could be the only way we could get more information.

(The referenced blogs are in Hungarian)

Tags:
Police
Censorship
Investigation
(Update addition: freehaowu
See my comment on what this is)