ZAMBOANGA CITY, 6 May 2005 — Radio broadcaster Kline Cantoneros of Dipolog City joined the growing list of murdered Philippine journalists after he succumbed to gunshot wounds late on Wednesday.

Cantoneros died in hospital before midnight Wednesday, and police urged witnesses to come forward and help solve the crime.

“We appeal to anyone who have information or those who witnessed the attack to come forward and help us resolve this case. Police forces are still searching for the perpetrators,” regional police chief Vidal Querol told Arab News.

The 34-year-old broadcaster was on his way home from work at radio station DXAA when he was shot seven times in the body before dawn on Wednesday in the village of Santa Felomina in Dipolog, a city in the northern part of the Zamboanga Peninsula in the southern Philippines.

Cantoneros told family members before he died that he knew his attackers only by their faces. “We believed the motive of the attack was either politics or illegal drugs because my brother had been very vocal on these issues in Dipolog. His radio commentaries touched on these subjects,” Querol said.

Cantoneros had frequently criticized local officials for alleged corruption and mismanagement in his early morning program. The broadcaster had received death threats, some through cell phone text messages, which he read on the air, colleagues said.

Police said when they rushed to the scene of the ambush early Wednesday, they found the critically wounded Cantoneros clutching his own .45 caliber pistol. He apparently was able to fire back at the three assailants, based on bullet shells found near him, police investigators said.

Police said Cantoneros was the fourth journalist to be killed in the Philippines this year, on top of 13 killed in 2004.

The Paris-based industry watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in an annual report issued on Tuesday that the Philippines, along with Bangladesh, was among the world’s most dangerous places for journalists.

Of those killed last year in the Philippines, six were killed by suspected hired killers, while seven others were slain in cases with unclear motives, RSF said.

Local politicians were the suspects in many of the cases, it said.

Another group, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), on said 18 Filipino journalists have been murdered for their work since 2000 and all had reported on government and police corruption, drug dealing, and the activities of crime syndicates and most of the vicitms were based in the southern Philippines.

“Many were rural radio commentators or reporters, who were ambushed in drive-by assassinations. Philippine journalists attribute the violence to a nationwide breakdown in law and order, the wide circulation of illegal arms, and the failure to convict a single person in the murders,” the CPJ said.

RSF has called on the United Nations to send a team to the Philippines to investigate the assassinations.

Threat to Press Freedom

In Manila, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) warned that the wave of violence threatened press freedom and democracy in the Philippines.

“Definitely, there’s a breakdown of law and order,” Carlos Conde, secretary-general of the NUJP and a reporter for the New York Times newspaper, told a news conference yesterday. “There’s a crisis of confidence in the capability of this government to keep the peace, to make sure that law and order reigns. And that’s the problem.” NUJP’s own records showed that 66 journalists have been killed in the Philippines since 1986, when democracy was restored after the ouster of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a popular revolt. Cantoneros is the second journalist killed in Dipolog since 1986.

The Philippines prides itself on having the freest press in Southeast Asia, but no one has been convicted over the killings, raising suspicion that security forces are sometimes complicit.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s spokesman, Ignacio Bunye, on Tuesday disputed the report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, saying it was exaggerated.

The NUJP criticized Bunye’s comments.

“The administration’s rhetoric is not matched by any action,” the NUJP statement said. “Either the administration is incredibly naive or ignorant about what’s happening or it is woefully in denial.”

The president’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, who has been hounded by the media over corruption allegations, complained yesterday that Manila’s press wielded “too much power.”

“It’s really shocking what is happening to the Manila media. We have been maligned with second-hand information,” he told a reporters’ association on the central island of Negros.

“Maybe that is the way to sell papers, by telling lies.”

He said reports linking him, his son and his brother to an illegal numbers game were unfair, accusing some journalists of deliberately “failing to tell the truth.” (With input from agencies)