London, May 5 (ANI): The Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan has won a strange honour of being perhaps the only media in the world not to report the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US Navy Seals, keeping 30 million people in the dark about the news of the decade.
A spokesman for Pravda Vostoka, the leading government mouthpiece, said it had not heard about bin Laden's death because it did not have an internet connection, Uznews, a website for exiled Uzbeks, reported.
The spokesman added that bin Laden's death was "unlikely to be of interest to its readership."
A spokesman for the Uzbek national news agency said that while the agency had been aware of bin Laden's death, his correspondents had failed to get through to political analysts who could provide commentary on the event, The Telegraph reports.
The agency was planning to publish an analysis of bin Laden's demise later, he said.
The uzreport.com website complained that it did not have correspondents in the region who could confirm the reports.
Osama bin Laden's death is by no means irrelevant to Uzbekistan, which has long struggled to contain Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, its own al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group.
It shares a 90-mile border with Afghanistan, and allows the US military to ship supplies to troops across its territory.
By Wednesday afternoon, none of the Uzbek news agencies had corrected the oversight.
Turkmenistan's state-controlled media has also not reported bin Laden's demise.
The two countries ranked in the bottom 10 for the freedom of the press in this year's index by Freedom House. (ANI)
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