Daily Times

NEW DELHI: In the latest media killing in Asia’s deadliest country for reporters, gunmen shot dead two journalists in 24 hours in separate incidents in eastern India on Saturday, police and local reports said.

Rajdeo Ranjan, the local bureau chief for Daily Hindustan, was travelling on his motorcycle late on Friday in Bihar state when a group of unidentified assailants shot him five times. “He was shot from a very close range. We rushed him to a hospital where he was declared dead on arrival last night,” said Saurabh Kumar Sah, the district police chief.

He also said that the police were yet to ascertain the motive behind the killing, but two people have been detained for questioning. “We are focusing more on professional angle since he may have written some things about certain people that may have led to this,” he added. In another incident, television journalist Akhilesh Pratap Singh was also shot dead by unidentified assailants as he returned home on a motorbike in Jharkhand state according to local reports.

“We have no eyewitnesses yet but we suspect that the assailants too were on motorcycle,” the Indian Express newspaper quoted a senior state police official Upendra Prasad, as saying. “It is not immediately clear if the journalist had (received) any threat from anybody,” he said.

Singh’s family members and supporters held a protest, and blocked roads, and demanded compensation and swift police action against the perpetrators. According to Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontiers, India was the deadliest country in Asia for journalists in 2015. It is also one of the most restrictive countries for the press, being ranked 133 out of 180 nations by the group.

Journalists in India often face harassment and intimidation by police, politicians, bureaucrats and criminal gangs, while scores of them work in hostile conditions in conflict-ridden pockets of the country. In October last year, gunmen on a motorbike shot dead a television journalist in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh as he returned home from a market. A freelance reporter also died after being doused with petrol and set on fire in Uttar Pradesh in June 2015.