Media body outraged over murder of 2 journalists
NEW DELHI: Two journalists in India were shot to death in separate attacks over the previous two days, police said on Saturday, raising questions about the safety of members of the news media in the country.
One of the journalists, Rajdeo Ranjan, was riding his motorcycle on Friday night in the Siwan district of Bihar state when assailants, also on motorcycles, shot him multiple times, said Saurav Shah, superintendent of police in Siwan. Ranjan, 45, was the bureau chief in the district for the Hindi newspaper Hindustan.
On Thursday evening, Akhilesh Pratap Singh, a journalist for a television channel in the Chatra district of Jharkhand state, was shot to death by at least one assailant while riding his motorcycle, a police officer in the district said. The officer declined to give his name because he was not authorised to speak to the news media.
The Committee to Protect Journalists put out a statement on Friday condemning the killings. “While police investigations into the murders of journalists are welcome, investigations without arrests or tough prison sentences for the killers send the wrong message,” said Sumit Galhotra, senior research associate for the committee’s Asia programme. “India’s abysmal record of prosecuting those who kill journalists is fostering an increasingly dangerous climate for the media.”
The committee has linked 11 killings to news gathering in India in the past decade. All, according to a 2015 report, were carried out with impunity. India ranks 133rd of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders 2016 World Press Freedom Index, “because of the number of journalists killed and the impunity for crimes of violence against the media”, it said.
Police detained two people in Siwan on Saturday in their investigation of the shooting of Ranjan, Mr Shah said. He said the police were looking into the possibility that Ranjan’s reporting was the motive.
“He has been a journalist for the past 18 years,” Mr Shah said. “Of late he had rubbed some politicians the wrong way by some stories he did.”
Ranjan covered crime and politics in Siwan, an area that is home to a former lawmaker convicted of murder and kidnapping. Local journalists said Ranjan covered court proceedings against the former politician, Mohammed Shahabuddin, from 2005 to 2007. Shahabuddin was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping a political worker from the Communist Party of India. Last year, Shahabuddin and three others were convicted of kidnapping and killing two brothers in Siwan.
Ranjan’s office was attacked in 2005 by “some criminals”, his nephew Rahul Yadav said.
Singh, the reporter in Jharkhand, covered local corruption scandals, police said. There were no witnesses to the shooting, and the police were investigating possible motives.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley strongly condemned the killings in a Twitter post Saturday, adding that an “independent investigation may be instituted”.