2007 deadliest year for reporters since 1994: press group
NEW YORK (AFP) — Sixty-four journalists were killed on assignment in 2007, making it the deadliest year for reporters since 1994, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a report published Tuesday.
Iraq remained the deadliest place for journalists for the fifth straight year, with 31 media workers -- all but one of them Iraqi -- killed there in the last year, 24 of them in targeted killings, the organization said.
Besides Iraq, five reporters were killed in Pakistan, seven in Somalia and five in Sri Lanka, it added.
The committee said it had recorded a higher death toll among media staffers only in 1994, when conflicts were raging in Bosnia, Rwanda and Algeria and when 66 journalists were killed. Fifty-six reporters were killed in 2006.
"Working as a journalist in Iraq remains one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet," said the committee's executive director, Joel Simon. "Members of the press are being hunted down and murdered with alarming regularity.
"They are abducted at gunpoint and found dead later or shot dead on the spot. Those who die are nearly always Iraqi and many work for international news agencies," he added.
The organization's toll did not include 12 media support workers, such as bodyguards and drivers who were also killed in Iraq in 2007.
The latest killings took the toll since the beginning of the war in March 2003 to 124 journalists and 49 media workers, the report found, making it the deadliest conflict for the press in recent history.
The report, however, highlighted some positive changes, with no journalists being reported killed in Colombia for the first time in more than 15 years and in the Philippines for the first time since 1999.
Overall, the report found that murder was the leading cause of work-related mortality for journalists worldwide, accounting for around seven in 10 reporters' deaths on the job in 2007.
The Committee further appealed for authorities in the Philippines and Russia to investigate a spate of unsolved journalists' deaths, decrying what it said was a 90 percent impunity rate.
"Unsolved killings spread fear and self-censorship, crippling the work of the media," said Simon. "We need to break the cycle by bringing the killers of journalists to justice."
One of the most widely reported media deaths of 2007 was that of Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai, filmed apparently being shot by troops in Myanmar in September during a crackdown on anti-government demonstrations.
