A Philippine correspondent has died after being shot Wednesday, a press advocacy group said, becoming the latest in a long line of journalists killed in the country.
The archipelago nation is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, and most of their killers go unpunished.
Jesus Malabanan was killed in Calbayog City in the central province of Samar, according to a statement on the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines’ (NUJP) Facebook page.
Malabanan was a correspondent for the Manila Standard in the Central Luzon region, north of the capital, the newspaper told AFP, confirming his death.
He also worked as a stringer for Reuters.
The international news agency said it was “deeply saddened” to learn of the death of Malabanan, who had worked on its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the drug crackdown in the Philippines in 2017.
The NUJP’s Pampanga provincial chapter on the main island of Luzon condemned the “senseless killing”.
Police in Calbayog declined to provide details when contacted by AFP.
Malabanan’s death comes less than two months after Orlando Dinoy, a reporter on the southern island of Mindanao, was shot dead in his apartment.
At the time, Dinoy was the 21st journalist killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took power in 2016, the NUJP said previously.
In a report issued in October before the latest killings, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists listed the Philippines at seventh place in its Global Impunity Index, with 13 murders of journalists still unsolved.
The nation has been a mainstay in the annual index since it started in 2008.
© Agence France-Presse