BRASILIA: A blogger-reporter was gunned down in the northeastern state of Maranhao, the fourth reporter killed inBrazil this year, authorities said Tuesday.
The Maranhao public security secretariat said in a statement that based on a preliminary investigation, two men on a motorcycle arrived at a bar where journalist Decio Sa was located shortly beforemidnightMonday and shot him four times in the head and twice in the thorax.
Maranhao's public security secretary Aluisio Mendes told reporters there was "no doubt the murder was ordered."
Police said they would use information from Sa's blog which contained investigative reporting and accusations against politicians and armed groups, to try to shed light on the killing.
Reporters without Borders issued a statement demanding a thorough investigation of the murder.
"This meticulously planned murder must alert the authorities to the safety of journalists in the country's north and northeast regions," the group said, recalling that four journalists died the past three months.
"It seems clear that Decio Sa's murder was linked to his coverage of the crimes of gunmen in Maranhao", the executive director of the Brazilian National Association of Newspapers, Ricardo Pedreira, told the news website G1.
In February, Paulo Rodrigues, editor of the Mercosul News website, died in Ponta Para, in the southern Mato Grosso do Sul state, after being shot several times by two men on a motorcycle.
A week earlier, Mario Lopes, 50, the editor of the website Vassouras na net, which criticized local politicians, judges and police, was shot dead with his girlfriend in the state ofRio de Janeiro.
And Laercio de Souza, a journalist of Sucesso radio in Camacari, in the northeastern state ofBahia, was also killed.
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