21st August, 2015
A South Sudanese journalist was on Wednesday assassinated, the manager of his newspaper has said.
Albert Otieno, Manager of the Corporate Newspaper, said in Juba, that one of his journalists, Moi-Peter Julius, was shot in the chest on Wednesday evening near a UN building in Juba, without removing anything from him.
“Money and Julius belongings were not removed.
Otieno said the journalist was killed four days after President Salva Kiir, dismissed journalists’ complaints about lack of press freedom and threatened to kill those reporting “against the country”.
He recalled that Kiir said on Sunday before leaving for peace talks in Addis Ababa that “If anybody among journalists does not know that this country has killed people, we will demonstrate it one day, one time.
“Freedom of the press does not mean you work against the country,” he said.
Tom Rhodes, Head of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said “The leader of any country threatening to kill journalists is extremely dangerous and utterly unacceptable.
He called on President Kiir to retract his comments immediately.
Rhodes said his committee had tied the killings of five journalists, in February in an ambush of a convoy, in South Sudan to government hand work.