The 16 March 1997 slaying in Kashmir of Saidain Shafi, a contributor to programs carried on the official Indian television network Doordarshan, marks the second time in 1997 that a Kashmiri broadcast journalist has been killed and the eighth time that a journalist has been assassinated in Kashmir since an armed insurgency against Indian rule broke out in late 1989.
On 16 March, two unidentified gunmen, suspected of being militant separatists, ambushed Shafi in the Narsingh-Garh area of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir State, as he was returning to his car from a nearby phone booth. The gunmen fired first at Shafi's personal security officer, Manohar Lal, fatally wounding him, before turning to Shafi and shooting him in the neck. Shafi's mother, who was in the car at the time, was not injured. The gunmen immediately fled the scene in an auto-rickshaw. No one has claimed responsibility for the murder.
Shafi had worked as a reporter for two privately-produced programs that were aired nationwide on Doordarshan: "Kashmir File", a weekly news program that was recently discontinued, and "Ankhoun Dekhi" (Eyewitness), a five-minute nightly news capsule. "Kashmir File" had been particularly critical of militant separatists in the state, and Shafi had told colleagues and authorities that he had received threats from separatists for his allegedly biased reporting.
Shafi's murder comes just two-and-a-half months after the slaying of another Kashmiri broadcast journalist, Altaf Ahmed Faktoo, by suspected separatists. A news reader for the Srinagar television station Doordarshan Kendra, Faktoo was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in a Srinagar hotel owned by his family (see IFEX alert dated 24 January 1997). Shafi and Faktoo were among a small group of Kashmiri Muslim journalists who worked for the state-owned broadcast media or programs carried by them. Most others had resigned in the wake of a warning issued to news readers and analysts at Doordarshan Kendra and Radio Kashmir in June 1993 by the militant group Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen.
