Mexican journalist under police protection killed: government

A Mexican crime reporter who was under police protection because of an attempt on his life was shot and killed Sunday, local officials said.

Alejandro Martinez Noguez, who ran a popular news outlet on Facebook, was killed while riding in a car with his bodyguards in the central state of Guanajuato after a reporting assignment, the security department of the city of Celaya said.

“Civilian attackers in a pickup truck opened fire with long guns at a car assigned to the reporter and his team of bodyguards by the city government,” the secretariat said in a statement.

Police sources told AFP that highway police traveling with Martinez fired back at the assailants but the reporter was shot in the head while sitting in the back seat.

He was rushed to a hospital but died.

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A woman in another car was hit and wounded by a stray bullet, the sources said.

Martinez, who was in his 50s, survived a shooting in 2022 and since then had been assigned protection by the city government under a federal program for reporters who receive death threats, a government official told AFP.

“He was a journalist who was at risk,” Balbina Flores, Reporters Without Borders’ delegate in Mexico, told AFP.

“He was very well known in Celaya, he was a colleague with a lot of years under his belt,” she added.

Martinez was known by the nickname “El Hijo del Llanero Solititito”, a nod to the title of his news page — itself a play on “The Lone Ranger”.

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His last report was a 20-minute video about a highway accident, which went online shortly before he was killed. His news outlet has around 343,000 followers.

Hard hit by violence related to drug trafficking, Mexico is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists, news advocacy groups say.

Reporters Without Borders says more than 150 newspeople have been killed in Mexico since 1994.

Earlier this month, Federico Hans, a journalist in the town of Caborca in northern Sonora state, was shot and wounded as he got into his car outside his home.

And on June 29 Victor Culebro, director of another news page on Facebook, was found dead along a highway in the southern state of Chiapas.

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– By: © Agence France-Presse