A radio broadcaster has been found dead in the southern Philippines, becoming the country's sixth journalist to be killed this year, officials and colleagues said Wednesday.
Eddie Apostol, 52-year-old radio talk host of a show “Council on the Air” at DXND radio, was shot twice in the head. His body was bounded by a rope and recovered by soldiers in the marshes five days after his family reported him missing.
“He was hogtied and had been shot in different parts of his body. But we are not certain if the killing has something to do with his work,” said Malu Manar, DXND program director said in an interview with social news networking website Rappler. “The victim’s motorbike and money were missing,”
Nestor Burgos, chairman of the media watchdog National Union for Journalists of the Philippines, told AFP it was not immediately clear if the killing was related to Apostol's work.
"We always consider journalist killings here as possibly work-related," Burgos said.
Apostol hosted a talk show discussing development issues, the union said. Outspoken journalists are routinely attacked in the Philippines, which watchdogs say is one of the most dangerous places in the world for members of the press.
The union said Apostol was the sixth journalist to be killed in the Philippines this year, four of whom were considered to have been killed because of their work, according to journalist union official Rowena Paraan.
The Philippines ranked third on the 2012 Impunity Index by the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) which highlights countries where journalists are regularly murdered and their killers escape punishment.
Source: DCMF, AFP
