By Xinhua,
Baghdad : Two Iraqi journalists were killed in separate incidents in Baghdad and Diyala province in northeast of the capital, police and media sources said on Thursday.
Wisam Ali Oudah, a cameraman working for private television station Afaq, was killed on Wednesday afternoon by a sniper while heading home in the Obeidi neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, an employee in the TV station told Xinhua.
Mu’aiyad al-Lami, top official in the Iraqi Journalists’ Union, told Xinhua that representatives from the union headed by Jabbar al-Shimmary, the head of the union, went to Oudah family to express the condolence of the Iraqi journalists.
In Diyala province, the body of Haidar al-Husseini who works for the local al-Sharq newspaper, was found on Wednesday in the town of Buhruz south of the provincial capital of Baquba, a police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The victim has been kidnapped two days earlier by unknown gunmen, he said.
Earlier in the month, the Journalistic Freedom Observatory (JFO), an Iraqi media watchdog, said in a report that violations against journalists and media workers in Iraq during the period of May 2007 to May 2008 went up by 60 percent compared with the same period last year.
The JFO said that 197 violations against journalists have been registered during the past 12 months, namely a violation every 43 hours.
The international watchdog Reporters Without Borders listed Iraq as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists and media workers with at least 235 killed the country since the start of U.S.-led war in March 2003.
Statistics of the Iraqi Union of Journalists show that more than 270 of its members and media workers have been killed during the period.