A British journalist was charged with illegal possession of war weapons on Tuesday for carrying protective gear en route to the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul, police said.
Anthony Cheng, a British journalist at Chinese broadcaster CCTV, was detained at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport Monday night along with his colleague, Florian Witulski, a German freelance photojournalist because of protective gear in his luggage, airport police officer Somchart Chatree said.
Cheng was charged with illegal possession of war weapons and could face up to five years in prison after airport police found plates for his body armour and gas masks in his bag, Somchart said.
Witulski was released without a charge because police did not find protective gear in his bag.
Cheng announced on his Facebook page Tuesday that he had been released on bail after spending almost one day behind bars at the airport.
"I don't actually have body armour ... just ceramic plates ... and gas masks ... for use in Mosul where Daesh are well documented to be using gas," Cheng wrote on his Facebook page.
"I was unaware either of those things were classified as 'war weapons'," he added.
Both Cheng and Witulski were supposed to board a plane on Monday night to Mosul, Iraq's second most populous city and the largest to have been under Daesh control.
"And I thought the danger would start when we got to Iraq," Cheng wrote on his Twitter page alongside a photo he took of a prison cell at the airport.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) on Tuesday urged Thai authorities to drop the charge against Cheng and to allow journalists to carry equipment to protect themselves, saying it was "deeply unhappy" with the situation.
"It should be noted that Cheng was leaving the country at the time of his arrest, and intended to use the banned safety equipment outside Thailand. He therefore posed no conceivable threat to national security," the FCCT said in a statement.
Cheng is not the first journalist to be charged with carrying protective gear in Thailand. In 2015, Anthony Kwan Hok-chun, a photojournalist from Hong Kong, was charged with carrying a bulletproof vest and a helmet while covering a bombing in Bangkok that killed 20 people.
Thai authorities dropped the charge against Hok-chun six months later.
