India fifth-most deadliest place to be a journalist, Afghanistan worst: Report

A new report by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) shows there has been an increase in the number of journalists killed this year, with a total of 80 killed so far. Of these, 63 were professional journalists, compared with 55 professional journalists killed last year. RSF said 348 others were detained, 60 were held hostage and 3 are missing. Targeted: Of the 80 killed, 49 were deliberately targeted because their reporting threatened the interests of certain people in positions of political, economic, or religious power or organised crime. Syria, Afghanistan... India: The report said 15 journalists were killed in Afghanistan in 2018, making the nation the deadliest place to report from, 17 years after the US-led war began. 11 were killed in Syria, 9 in Mexico, 8 in Yemen, and 6 each in India and the United States. The positive news was from Iraq, where RSF reported no journalist was killed for the first time since the US-led invasion of 2003. Far from war: India's data highlights the risk journalists face even in countries not at war. Nearly half the media fatalities were from nations not at war. In India, RSF highlighted two cases: "A village chief in the northeastern Indian state of Bihar killed two journalists, Navin Nischal and Vijay Singh, in retaliation for their reporting by deliberately running them down with his SUV on 25 March. On the same day in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, a dump truck was used to run down and kill Sandeep Sharma, a journalist who had been investigating the local 'sand mafia'." Nischal and Singh worked for Dainik Bhaskar; family members allege they were killed by a village head. Sharma, a TV journalist, had filed a police complaint, citing immediate threat to his life from a police officer after a sting operation regarding sand mining, before being mowed down by a commercial vehicle. Deadliest single attack on US media: Of the 6 killed in the US, four journalists were among the five employees of the Capital Gazette, a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, who were killed on 28 June when a man walked in and opened fire with a shotgun. The shooting was the deadliest single attack on the media in recent US history. Of the 348 journalists detained in 2018, RSF said, 60 were in China, 38 in Egypt, 33 in Turkey, and 28 each in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Political repercussions: Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime, was killed on October 2 inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His death has led to tremors on the global political scene around allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved. Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalise his divorce, but was instead strangled and dismembered allegedly by Saudi agents. Person of the year: Time magazine recently recognised jailed and killed journalists as its "person of the year,'' including Khashoggi, Maria Ressa imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo imprisoned in Myanmar, and staff at the Capital Gazette. Source: Times of India