Altaf Ahmed Faktoo, a news reader for the state-owned Doordarshan Kendra television station in Srinagar, Kashmir, was assassinated on 1 January 1997 by suspected militant separatists. Three unidentified men entered the Crown Hotel, owned by Faktoo's family, in Srinagar's heavily patrolled LalChowk area.
They fired two shots at the journalist with a silencer pistol before fleeing the scene. No one has claimed responsibility for the murder. Faktoo is the seventh journalist to have been murdered in Kashmir since the militant movement began in 1989, and the third who was specifically targeted because of his work with the state-owned broadcast media.
Faktoo had faced repeated threats from militant separatists for his work with Doordarshan Kendra. He was kidnapped and briefly detained by a militant group in 1994, after which he requested and received permission to read the Urdu-language job listingsprogram "Rozgaar Samachar" ("Employment News") instead of regular news broadcasts. Besides reading for "Rozgaar Samachar", Faktoo had also edited background material for several non-political documentaries.
Shortly before his murder, however, he had started reading for a news program about Kashmir broadcast by satellite to the rest of India. Faktoo had told colleagues at Doordarshan Kendra that he felt safe working on the program because it was not being shown in the Kashmir Valley, where the separatist movement is centered.
Faktoo had been the first Kashmiri news reader to go on the air when the Doordarshan Kendra news centre in Srinagar reopened on 13 July 1993, after a three-year closure prompted by the assassination of station director Lassa Kaul. Many of his Kashmiri colleagues at Doordarshan Kendra and Radio Kashmir subsequently left their jobs after the militant group Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen warned them against working for state-owned media. Further resignations followed the assassination of Radio Kashmir news reader Mohammad Shafi Bhat on 2 October 1993, for which the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen claimed responsibility. Of the Kashmiri news readers who remained with Doordarshan Kendra,Faktoo was alone in choosing not to live with a military security cover.
