New York,
March 27, 2009--Pakistani
authorities must not allow Thursday's shooting death of veteran Pakistani
reporter Raja Assad Hameed in Rawalpindi go uninvestigated and unprosecuted,
the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Unidentified gunmen killed Raja Assad Hameed, a reporter with the English-language daily The Nation and its Urdu-language television channel, Waqt, while he was parking his car at his house.
Media accounts of the attack varied. Beena Sarwar, a media
and human rights activist, looked closely into the murder and described what
she found to CPJ: “His family rushed out on hearing the gunshots and found
Hameed lying in a pool of blood. The bullets, fired at close range, had pierced
his neck and shoulder.” Doctors pronounced the journalist dead on arrival
at
Hameed was well-known and held in high regard. He was fluent
in English, Urdu, and Punjabi, and frequently appeared on Al-Jazeera, analyzing
political developments in
The day after the attack, Federal Information Minister
Qamar-uz-Zaman Kaira told the official Associated Press of Pakistan that “sick-minded
criminals must have committed the murder of a journalist in
