PESHAWAR: Unidentified gunmen on Sunday killed a TV journalist, police said, the second such murder this month in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Attackers riding a motorcycle fired on 42-year-old Hafeez Ur Rehman near his home on the outskirts of Kohat district.
“He was hit by three bullets and died on the spot,” Fazal Naeem, a police spokesman in Kohat, told reporters.
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 militants 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 fifth attack on members of the media in the past three 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 UN report.
The report criticised 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.