US officials accused of censoring images of the dead

US officials have been accused of trying to censor free speech by asking the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped US military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said.

Larry Siems of the PEN American Centre, an authors’ group that defends free expression, said: “It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story.”