MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Unidentified assailants shot a journalist dead outside his home in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, state prosecutors said on Wednesday, in the second killing of a reporter in the past week.
Eduardo Ochoa, a 29-year-old freelance journalist and teacher in the city of Uruapan, was shot in the jaw, chest and hand when he left his home to buy food on Tuesday, prosecutors said.
The Michoacan attorney general’s office said it was unclear how many people took part in the attack or what motivated it.
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of suffering reprisals, a friend of the dead journalist told Reuters that Ochoa, who covered security matters, had received death threats from local criminals and wanted to quit the profession.
The killing of Ochoa follows the slaying on Sunday morning of journalist Pablo Morrugares along with a bodyguard in the southwestern city of Iguala in Guerrero state.
Two days later, unidentified gunmen shot up the offices of local newspaper Diario de Iguala, state prosecutors said.
Long convulsed by drug gangs, Michoacan and Guerrero are among the most lawless and violent states in Mexico.
According to a tally kept by Reporters Without Borders, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting freedom of information, three journalists had been killed in Mexico this year before the deaths of Morrugares and Ochoa.
(Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
