Iraqi authorities have vowed to hunt down the killers of journalists, days after the head of the country's biggest journalist organisation became the latest media worker to meet a violent death, Reuters has reported.
The interior ministry said 270 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called the Iraq war the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history.
"Orders have been given from the interior ministry to start a campaign to capture the killers of journalists and media workers in Iraq," ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul-Karim Khalaf told Reuters.
He said the order came after the killing of the head of Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, Shihab al-Tamimi, who died on Wednesday four days after being seriously wounded by gunmen who fired on his car in Baghdad.
Tamimi, 74, was an independent journalist working for local newspapers. He was known for his outspoken views against the 2003 invasion and the presence of US troops on Iraqi soil. He was also a stern critic of Iraq's sectarian violence.
Khalaf said inquiries into the killing of 43 journalists were under way, and that Iraq's head of criminal investigations was supervising the cases personally. Jabbar Tarrad, Tamimi's former deputy at the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, has been made the new syndicate chief, the organisation said.
