Nadir Shah Sahibzada, a local radio anchor in the eastern province of Paktia was killed in an attack by unknown men in Gardiz, the central city of the province, on Friday evening, the provincial police spokesman Sardar Wali Tabassum said on Saturday.
Nadir Shah was working as a producer and anchor of cultural and social programs in Sada-e-Gardiz Radio Station for the past three years, officials from the radio station said.
Tabassum said police have started an investigation into the incident, but so far no one has claimed responsibility for it.
Abdul Rashid Jalalzai, an official from the radio station, has said that Nadir Shah was disappeared on Friday evening and security forces found his body in Bagh-e-Per area in Gardiz on Saturday.
Quoted by NAI, a journalists’ rights organization, Jalazai said the marks on Nadir Shah’s body show that he was stubbed and tortured to death.
According to NAI statistics, Sahibzada is the seventh journalist killed in Afghanistan so far this year.
NAI in a statement called on the Ministry of Interior Affairs to run a thorough investigation into the murder of the journalist.
According to local officials, this is the first time that a local journalist is killed in Paktia.
A report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released in April shows that for Afghanistan’s journalists, 2018 was the deadliest year since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.
According to the report, a total of 15 journalists and media workers were killed in a series of bombings that began early in the year, nine of them in a single day.
Government’s statistics show that there are 96 TV channels, 65 radio stations and 911 print media in Kabul, as well as 107 TV channels, 284 radio stations, and 416 print media in other provinces. He says there are 1,879 active media outlets in Afghanistan which are called as one of the main achievements of the country in the past 18 years.
