AP condemns US telephone record seizure

Chief executive Gary Pruitt said AP was told on Friday the justice department had gathered records of outgoing calls from more than 20 phone lines .

Mr Pruitt said there could be "no possible justification for such an overbroad collection".

The justice department has provided no explanation for the seizure.

However, officials have previously said the US Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia was conducting a criminal investigation into information contained in an AP story last year, kazinform refers to BBC.

Published in May 2012, the article was about a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a US-bound airplane.

The story was embarrassing to the government, coming shortly after it had informed the public that there was nothing to suggest any such attack had been planned, says the BBC's David Willis in Washington.

Records for the phone numbers of five reporters and an editor who were involved in the AP story were among those obtained in April and May 2012.

AP said the seizure of records for general switchboard numbers and a fax line at its offices in New York, Hartford, in Connecticut, Washington DC and the House of Representatives was unusual and largely unprecedented.

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters," Mr Pruitt wrote in a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder.

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