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A journalist was shot dead by unidentified assailants in a high security zone in Pakistan’s Rawalpindi, according to a media report. Anjum Munir Raja, 40, was returning home on a motorcycle late on Thursday night when the bike-borne attackers waylaid him and opened fire, the police said.
Raja was shot six times on the head, neck and torso, killing him instantly, the report said, adding that the attackers then fled. Raja was father to a five-year-old boy; he used to teach at a school in the mornings and worked as a sub-editor for an Islamabad-based Urdu newspaper in the evenings, his uncle Tariq Mehmood said.
Mehmood said his nephew did not have any personal enmity with anyone, and expressed shock over the killing in such a “highly-secured” area, according to the report.
Pakistan is among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalism, France-based watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said, in its annual press freedom report last May.
According to the 2017 World Press Freedom Index compiled by RSF, Pakistan ranks 139 out of 180 countries. At least 117 journalists have been killed in the past 15 years in Pakistan, and of these, only three cases were taken up in the judicial courts.
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