Gunmen attack two media outlets in Mexican city

Ciudad Juarez (Mexico), March 7 (IANS/EFE) Gunmen opened fire Wednesday on two media outlets in Ciudad Juarez, a border city in northern Mexico, but no one was injured, police said.

There were “separate reports of armed attacks on two media outlets and officers were sent to secure the area”, a police spokesman told EFE.

The offices of Diario de Ciudad Juarez, the border city’s largest newspaper, were hit by at least seven shots, the daily said in a story posted on its web site.

Channel 44 television said its facility was damaged by “at least 10 shots that hit the windows of the guard booth, as well as a gate that protects the property” in Ciudad Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

These are just the latest attacks on the Mexican media in recent weeks.

Jaime Guadalupe Gonzalez, editor of an online news site, was killed Sunday afternoon by gunmen in Ojinaga, a border city in the northern state of Chihuahua.

Unidentified individuals attacked the offices of the El Siglo newspaper in Torreon, a city in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, three times last week, killing one person and wounding two others.

Amnesty International, for its part, called on the Mexican government on Tuesday to do more to protect journalists in the wake of Gonzalez’s murder.

“The repeated killing of journalists in recent years, which can only have been encouraged by the prevailing impunity for such crimes, has had a direct impact on reporting in Mexico,” the human rights group said.

—IANS/EFE

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IANS 2013-03-07 12:00:09