Another Al Jazeera cameraman detained by NATO troops this week and a local TV reporter arrested by Afghan security forces remain in detention.

"I'm freed," Mohammad Nader told AFP as he left Kandahar Airfield, the biggest NATO base in southern Afghanistan.

"They said I can go, 'you're free'," Nader said.

The journalist was picked up from his home in Kandahar city early Wednesday. NATO's International Security Assistance Force said it had "captured a suspected Taliban media and propaganda facilitator".

The force also said the journalist "participated in filming election attacks".

A second Afghan cameraman working for Al Jazeera was detained in Ghazni province, another Taliban-troubled region in the south. A third journalist was arrested by the Afghan spy agency in Kapisa, near Kabul.

President Hamid Karzai on Thursday ordered the information and culture minister to investigate the detentions and secure the journalists' release.

Local media rights advocates criticised the arrests as a violation of freedom of speech in the war-scarred nation, where Islamist insurgents have been battling to topple a Western-backed democracy since 2001.

"This harms democracy and freedom of speech," said Abdul Hamid Mubarez, head of the Afghanistan Journalists' Association.

After the detention of its staff, the Doha-based Al Jazeera accused NATO of trying to suppress its coverage of the war.

The network provided AFP with a transcript of a telephone conversation with ISAF, in which a spokesman confirmed the arrest of the cameramen and accused them of "propaganda facilitation" on behalf of the insurgents.

The network said ISAF had obliquely accused the two men of working for the Taliban to spread their propaganda and intimidate ordinary Afghans.

"The insurgents use propaganda, often delivered through news organisations, as a way to influence and in many cases intimidate the Afghan population," the network quoted ISAF as saying in a letter.

Al Jazeera rejected the allegations, saying the men were "innocent".

The network's Afghanistan correspondent Sue Turton said that most of Al Jazeera's local reporters feared arrest.

Its Afghanistan-based reporters are known to have good ties with insurgent groups -- as do many journalists working in the war zone -- and have reported from Taliban-controlled regions, areas that remain no-go areas for the majority of reporters covering the conflict.

"Eighty percent of our stringers or every stringer who works in a dangerous region has now left their location for fear that they will be next to be arrested by the security forces," Turton told AFP.

Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said of the three journalists who were arrested: "In all three cases, journalists working in difficult provinces have been treated like dangerous criminals".

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