MANILA: Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and wounded a radio commentator in the Philippines’ northern tobacco region, the first case of violence against journalists this year in the country, police and a local press union said Friday.
Eugene Paet was on his way home after work at a radio station owned by a powerful political clan in Ilocos Sur province when the gunmen fired at him on Thursday night, said Eduardo Dupale, provincial police chief.
“He was hit in the body but was able to run away from his would-be assassins,” Dupale told reporters, adding the radio talk show host is now in stable condition at a hospital in Vigan. “We’re now trying to establish the motive for the attack. It’s too early to conclude it was work-related because there could be other reasons for the attempt to kill him.”
The Philippines was listed as the most dangerous country for journalists in 2009 with the death of 30 local press members in a politically motivated massacre in a southern province in November, the Brussels-based International News Safety Institute said.
The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) said a total of 99 journalists had been killed in the country since 2001, with 37 deaths in 2009 alone. Investigative stories about drug trafficking, gambling, corruption and other illegal activities involving officials in the Philippines often put reporters at risk.
Corruption in the media, with underpaid journalists sometimes taking bribes to report stories, also places reporters in danger from disgruntled paymasters or their rivals.
Under fire from local and international human rights groups for its failure to protect hundreds of journalists and left-wing activists killed over the past eight years, the government has vowed to track down killers of reporters but there have been few convictions.
Diver dies
In a separate development, a Philippine coastguard diver died Friday retrieving bodies from a ship that sank in deep water in Manila Bay last month, the coastguard service said.
The death, the cause of which was not immediately clear, was a grim footnote in a catalogue of shipping disasters to have hit the country in recent years.
Petty Officer Armand Bonifacio lost consciousness while diving to the wreck of the Catalyn B, a small wooden ferry that sank December 24 after hitting a steel-hulled fishing boat, local coastguard chief Commodore Luis Tuason said. Although he regained consciousness after being pulled from the water and placed in a decompression chamber, Bonifacio died a few minutes later as he was being rushed to hospital.
Hours earlier, he had retrieved the body of a woman from the sunken ship, said Tuason.
While the cause of death was not confirmed, the coastguard admitted they were taking a risk as the wreck was located in 67 meters (220 feet) of water, more than the 150 feet that is the divers’ normal limit.
In an interview carried by the Philippine Star newspaper, coastguard deputy chief Lt. Commander Marcos Gines said the divers were using improvised equipment. “We knew that it would be a risky dive ... but we thought of the families of the passengers,” he said.
Officials said there were 11 confirmed dead from the sinking of the Catalyn-B and 16 still missing, their bodies believed trapped in the ship. Just days after the Catalyn-B went down, another ferry, MV Baleno-9, sank with six dead and 44 missing.
