Motorcycle gunmen kill journalist in Honduras
A Honduran journalist who was simply a sharp government critic has been killed in a drive-by shooting, police said Monday, bringing the number of reporters killed in the country to 85 in 2 decades.
Luis Almendares, 35, was visiting a store in Comayagua, 60 kilometers (40 miles) north of the capital Tegucigalpa, when he was shot multiple times on Sunday.
"He was intercepted by two individuals on a motorcycle, who shot him repeatedly," police said in a statement.
The journalist was taken to hospital with multiple gunshot wounds and died early Monday, according to Amada Ponce, director of the Committee free of charge Expression.
Almendares, a freelancer who used social media to criticize the government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez, had repeatedly complained to police and the country's National Protection System over acquiring death threats, the rights group said.
The government set up the National Protection System in 2015 in response to concerns expressed by the Organization of American States and the UN over the high number of killings involving rights defenders, attorneys and journalists.
The president of the Honduran association of journalists, Dagoberto Rodriguez, announced his group was withdrawing from the protection system in reaction to Almendares's death.
"The federal government has let this system go off course by giving it neither logistical nor financial means," Rodriguez said.
He slammed the impunity of those accountable for murdering journalists and members of the media, saying "the federal government shows that it isn't interested."
In June, a journalist and his cameraman were shot dead in the Caribbean port of La Ceiba. Two gang members were arrested as suspects for the reason that killing.
However, Ponce told AFP that a lot more than 90 percent of the 85 murders of journalists completed in Honduras since 2001 have gone unpunished.
The US human rights commissioner's Honduras office "urged the Honduran state to conduct an unbiased, prompt, effective and impartial investigation" into Almendares's killing.
The presidents of the Inter American Press Association and the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information also expressed their outrage, noting that 15 other journalists have already been murdered in the Americas because the start of 2020.--AFP
