Thiruvananthapuram, Jan 18 (IANS) Two days after media reports alleged that Kerala Police were snooping on emails of some Muslim leaders, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy Wednesday said the press had “distorted” the issue.

“It is with a lot of hard feelings that I have to state the wrong manner in which a section of the media here dealt with the particular news item. The sad part is that the list, when published, was distorted to appear in such a manner that a particular community was being targeted,” Chandy told reporters here after the weekly cabinet meeting.

“We today live in a hi-tech world and when the police were inquiring into the antecedents of a particular person, they came across his contact list which had 268 people,” the chief minister said, adding that a magazine then published a chunk of the names in a way which conveyed a wrong impression.

On Monday, news surfaced that the Intelligence Department here was snooping into the email accounts of Muslim leaders, besides journalists and politicians.