PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Unidentified gunmen on Sunday, November 22, killed a Pakistani TV journalist, police said, the second such murder this month in the insurgency-hit northwest.
Attackers riding a motorcycle fired on 42-year-old Hafeez Ur Rehman near his home on the outskirts of Kohat, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
"He was hit by 3 bullets and died on the spot," Fazal Naeem, a police spokesman in Kohat, told AFP.
The killing came weeks after a similar attack, later reportedly claimed by Taliban militants, on Zaman Mehsud, a newspaper journalist in the nearby town of Tank.
Rehman, who had been working as a journalist for 12 years, was employed by the Neo TV network. He was also publisher of his own daily, Asia, until it folded earlier this year.
The motive behind the latest attack was unclear. Rehman had not previously reported any threats against him.
But journalists in the region are often targeted by militants, mainly the Taliban.
The Islamist rebels have lately expressed unhappiness at the lack of coverage given to them by the Pakistani media, following a boycott order by the country's powerful military establishment.
The killing was the 5th attack on members of the media in the past 3 months.
A TV news technician and journalist were killed in separate incidents in the port city of Karachi in September, while a journalist was shot and injured in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
More than 70 Pakistani journalists and other media workers have lost their lives since 2001 while pursuing their duties, according to a United Nations report.
The report criticized a widespread culture of impunity and ranked Pakistan as the world's fifth worst country in terms of the number of unresolved cases of violence against journalists. – Rappler.com