BBC wildlife presenter Chris Packham was questioned for five hours by police in Malta yesterday over claims that he and his team had breached the privacy of local hunters and defamed them by filming them shooting migrating birds.
Packham, 51, has been on the island with the support of local charity Birdlife Malta to film a daily video diary documenting the spring shooting season. Under a controversial opt-out from the EU Birds Directive, 10,000 hunters are allowed to shoot two species of bird, the turtle dove and quail. But BirdLife International says that four million birds are killed every year, three million of them finches.
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