12 January - Nepal - Pushpa Shrestha
The Jwala Singh faction of Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha (JTMM), meaning Terai People's Liberation Front, shot dead a newspaper editor Pushpa Shrestha in Birgunj Municipality, situated some 90 km south of Kathmandu, on Saturday night.
Shrestha, editor of two local weeklies New Highway and New Season, was shot in his right shoulder by members of the group riding a motorcycle.
The incident took place in front of a local girls' Lower Secondary School during power outage.
Shrestha died around 11 p.m. local time (0545 GMT) Saturday while undergoing treatment at Narayani Sub-regional Hospital.
JTMM has claimed the responsibility for the killing.

14 January - Afghanistan - Carsten Thomassen
A Taliban attack on the Serena hotel, a luxury facility in the Afghan capital of Kabul, killed six people, including a Norwegian journalist.
The report said among those killed was an American and Carsten Thomassen a reporter for Dagbladets. The Norwegian newspaper announced the 38-year-old died at a hospital.
An Afghan government spokesman blamed the attack on a suicide bomber, but a witness said the victims died in gunfire. He said three or four of the victims were shot point blank by the attackers.
A Taliban spokesman told the BBC the attack was carried out by four militants armed with automatic rifles, grenades and explosives jackets. The militant group said the blast was caused by a bomber detonating his explosive jacket.

28 January - Somalia - Hassan Kafi Hared
Hassan Kafi Hared died after a remote-controlled mine exploded on a road in Siyad, a village in Kismayu in Southern Somalia, destroying a vehicle carrying two aid-workers from Medecins Sans Frontieres-Holland and their driver. Hared was passing at the time of the blast and was killed along with the vehicle's occupants. Hared, who was working with the Somali National News Agency and the website Gedonet.com, was on his way to a press conference in Kismayu.

30 January - Iraq - Alaa Abdul Karim
A roadside bomb killed a television journalist and a driver north of Baghdad. A correspondent and assistant cameraman were seriously wounded. The journalists who were killed and hurt worked for al-Forat TV, an Iraqi television station. It identified the men who were killed as Alaa Abdul Karim, a cameraman, and Alaa Assi, a driver.

7 February - Mexico - Alfonso Cruz Cruz
Bonifacio Cruz Santiago, the publisher of the weekly El Real, and his son, Alfonso Cruz Cruz, its editor, were fatally shot outside the town hall of Chimalhuacán, in the central state of Mexico.
According to local reports, the gunmen may have mistaken Bonifacio Cruz for a municipal legal advisor with whom the two journalists had an appointment.
Yesterday morning, Bonifacio and Alfonso Cruz went to the office of Raymundo Olivares Díaz, the Chimalhuacán town hall's legal advisor and former head of an association of small landowners. When they found that Olivares was not there, they went outside the town hall to wait, at which point two men in their 30s arrived and opened fire on them. The son was killed on the spot. The father died while being rushed to hospital. Two municipal employees were wounded in the shooting.
The local media suspect that the gunmen mistook Bonifacio Cruz for Olivares, who recently received death threats in connection with a land dispute between peasants. But, when contacted by Reporters Without Borders, Chimalhuacán town hall spokesman Miguel Ángel González advised against jumping to conclusions. "We are not yet able to establish the motives for the murder," he said. The prosecutor's office of the state of Mexico has taken charge of the case.

9 February - Pakistan - Chishti Mujahid
A senior journalist and a renowned press photographer was shot dead and a banned Baloch militant group has claimed responsibility for the murder.
Dr Chishti Mujahid was on his way to Quetta's Helper Hospital along with his sister when an unidentifed attacker fired two shots at him.
His body was shifted to the Civil Hospital for autopsy.
The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), an underground separatist group, claimed responsibility for murdering the journalist, saying that he had been supportive of government policies and indulged in 'anti-Baloch propaganda' in his political commentary.
Mirak Baloch, the BLA spokesman who called at the offices of several Quetta-based newspapers via a satellite phone from an unidentified location, said that they viewed Mujahid as a partial journalist and more of an official spokesman who propagated against the Baloch leaders and their struggle. "Mujahid wrote several articles against the Baloch struggle and late Nawab Akbar Bugti for which he was punished," said the spokesman.
According to the police, the bullets hit Mujahid on his head and chest. However, his sister and the driver escaped the attack.

12 February - Iraq - Hisham Mijawet Hamdan
Police discovered the body of Hisham Mijawet Hamdan, 27, a board member of the Young Journalists Association and took him to Al-Tib al-Adli morgue in Baghdad, Haidar Hasoun, founder and head of the association, told the Committee to Protect Journalists. He said that the journalist, who exhibited signs of torture, was shot in the head and chest.
Hamdan's family lost contact with him on Sunday morning when he went to buy stationery supplies from a Baghdad market, Hasoun said.
Hasoun told CPJ that Hamdan was active in a campaign organized by the association less than two months ago in support of the families of journalists killed in Iraq and called on the Iraqi government and civil society organizations to do more to assist them. He was also part of a committee formed to collect financial contributions for the families of slain journalists. Hamdan had appeared on Iraqi satellite channels advocating on behalf of the families, which may have made him a target, Hasoun said. CPJ is investigating the circumstances surrounding his abduction and murder.
Hamdan worked as a political reporter for the bimonthly paper Al-Siyassa wal-Karar, published by the Young Journalists Association. The paper's print edition recently became defunct, but the association maintains the paper's Web site, according to Hasoun, who serves as the editor-in-chief.

27 February - Iraq - Shihab Al-Timimi
Shihab Al-Timimi, 75, suffered a heart attack and died in hospital where he was taken after sustaining wounds to the stomach, shoulder and face when his car was hit by a hail of bullets in the attack. His son Rabei was also in the car and was slightly injured.

29 February - Pakistan - Siraj Uddin
Siraj Uddin, a correspondent of the English-language newspaper The Nation, was one of the at least 40 people who were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral of a slain police officer on 29 February in Mingora, a city in North-West Frontier Province's troubled Swat valley that has been under a curfew since the start of the year.

13 March - Iraq - Qassem Abdul Hussein al-Eqabi
Qassem Abdul Hussein al-Eqabi, a journalist working for the local al-Muwatin newspaper was killed when unknown gunmen in two cars showered him with bullets near the National Theater in Karrada neighborhood. Al-Muwaten newspaper is a daily political newspaper headed by former oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum.

19 March - Argentina - Juan Carlos Zambrano
Juan Carlos Zambrano, presenter of the programme “Con la gente” (With the people) on local Canal 7 television, was murdered in front of his home in San Salvador de Jujuy in north-western Argentina.
One of the two suspected killers has been arrested. The journalist’s colleagues immediately said that Zambrano, who received constant threats, must have been killed because of his work.
Zambrano was returning home at 2am today, when he was ambushed by two men, who shot him twice at point blank range. Nothing was stolen from him. Local officials said that one of his suspected killers had been arrested and the other one was still at large.
The 42-year-old, who had worked since 1992 for Canal 7, part of the Radio Televisión Jujuy group, launched a new weekly news programme at the beginning of March, “Con la gente”, covering local day-to-day problems. He had recently condemned on air a hike in the cost of public transport in Jujuy, which had brought him virulent criticism from several municipal councillors.
One of his colleagues, Sabrina Galván, said he had been under constant threat from Jujuy’s political and trade union figures. The presenter’s lawyer, Bruno Aguilar, told the organisation that Zambrano had received threats after saying he was going to take out a defamation suit against Pablo Lozano, a councillor in the provincial capital, San Salvador de Jujuy, who had strongly criticised him in two articles published in 2007.
Galván had no doubts about the motives for the killing. “This murder is linked to Juan Carlos Zambrano’s journalistic work. It was neither by chance nor for theft,” she told Reporters Without Borders.

21 March - Russia - Gadzhi Abashilov
The director of the state-run radio and television company, Dagestan, the 58-year-old Gadzhi Abashilov, was killed by unidentified individuals in Makhachkala.
An ITAR-TASS correspondent has been told at Makhachkala's Interior Ministry on-duty unit that the murder happened at 1645 gmt near the Tashkent supermarket in the Uzbek-gorodok residential area. Abashilov was in a Hyundai Sonata car with his driver. Unidentified individuals opened fire at them from a submachine gun and fled the scene. Abashilov died of wounds on the spot. The wounded driver was taken to hospital.
An operative investigative brigade is working at the scene. Measures to identify and detain the culprits are being taken.
Gadzhi Abashilov was a well-known journalist in the republic. He headed the republic's popular weekly Molodezh Dagestana [Dagestan's Youth] for 10 years. He worked as director of the Dagestan radio and television company for over a year.

26 March - China - Zhou Jian
26 March - China - Pan Fengqin
A terror attack or sabotage have been ruled out as the cause of the fatal fireworks disposal blast that killed 24 and left five missing in Turpan Cityof Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Wednesday, said a local party official.
The details were revealed by Sun Changhua, secretary of the Turpan Prefectural Committee of the Communist Party of China, at a press conference on Friday.
The explosion happened at about 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, when authorities in Turpan city, about 180 km south to Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, were disposing of eight truckloads of fireworks in the Gobi desert, about eight kilometers from the Turpan tollgate of national highway 202.
A total of 22 people died at the scene and 10 were injured. Oneof the injured died on the way to the hospital, and two more died later during operations at Turpan Prefecture People's Hospital.
Investigators later claimed that five people were missing in the explosion.
Seven of the eight trucks that were used to transport the fireworks were destroyed. A fire caused by the explosion was quickly put out.
Sun said the fireworks and other materials had been stored in 904 boxes in Hongqi Fireworks Plant for 10 years. The dry weather in Turpan raised the risk of explosion and the public security authorities decided to dispose of them.
The victims were said to be mainly police officers, staff of a local professional explosives disposal company and journalists covering the event.
Just 13 of the dead have so far been identified, of whom, six were of Han ethnicity and the others were of ethnic minority groups.
Among the dead were Zhou Jian, a journalist from the Turpan Radio Station, and Pan Fengqin, a woman camcorder operator from the local TV station.
The identities of the other bodies are yet to be established. Rescuers had been collecting the remains from the debris and DNA tests were being carried out to identify them.
According to the local party official, five seriously injured people have been transferred to a better-equipped hospital in Urumqi.
Burials of seven of the victims took place on Friday.

27 March - Bolivia - Carlos Quispe
A group that opposes the mayor attacked the city’s municipal building on March 27. The mob then moved onto the municipal radio station where they sacked the station and beat Carlos Quispe severely. He later died from his wounds in a hospital in La Paz. Carlos Quispe was a journalist working for Radio Municipal in the city of Pucarani, about 40 kilometres west of La Paz, Bolivia.

1 April - India - Mohammad Muslimuddin
Muslimuddin, a correspondent for the daily Asamiya Pratidin, was attacked about 10pm while returning home on a bicycle near in Jagirod in India’s north-eastern state of Assam. An unidentified armed group beat him with sharp weapons. The journalist has exposed several cases of corruption about a drug peddler known as ‘Pakhi Mia’.
Muslimuddin died on the way to Guwahati Medical Hospital.

7 April - Mexico - Teresa Bautista Flores
7 April - Mexico - Felicitas Martinez
Teresa Bautista Flores, 24, and Felicitas Martinez, 20, two women journalists working for La Voz que Rompe el Silencio ("The Voice that Breaks the Silence"), a community radio station serving the Trique indigenous community, were shot and killed on 7 April in Putla de Guerrero, in the southern state of Oaxaca.
La Voz que Rompe el Silencio was launched by the Trique indigenous community in San Juan Copala (in the west of Oaxaca state) on 20 January, a year after the locality was granted administrative autonomy. The community appointed Bautista Flores and Martinez to manage and present the radio station, which is dedicated to promoting indigenous culture.
The two young women were returning from doing a report in the municipality of Llano Juarez in the early afternoon when they were ambushed and, after being threatened with abduction, were finally shot with 7.62 calibre bullets of the kind used in AK-47 assault rifles. Investigators found 20 bullet casings at the scene. Three other people were wounded in the shooting.

8 April - Panama - Eliécer Santamaría
Eliécer Santamaría died in the early morning hours on Tuesday after he was stabbed while on assignment covering a story about gangs exchanging gunfire in the capital, according to reports.

14 April - Pakistan - Khadim Hussain Shaikh
Khadim on his way to office from his house along with his brother Ishaque on a motorbike when unidentified gunmen intercepted them and shot him from a close range. He died on the spot while his brother received bullet injuries and has been admitted to hospital. The journalists of the area held a protest demonstration against the murder.
Secretary General PFUJ Mazhar Abbas in a statement said, "It appeared to be a target killing. Khadim was the 29th journalist killed in Pakistan in the last eight years, which has made Pakistan one of the most dangerous places for reporting." He demanded immediate attention of the government.

16 April - Palestine - Fadel Shana
Shana was covering events in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for Reuters on a day of intense violence when 16 other Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers were also killed.
A medical examination showed that metal darts from an Israeli tank shell that explodes in the air caused the death of a Reuters cameraman killed in the Gaza Strip, doctors said.
X-rays displayed by physicians who examined the body of Fadel Shana in Gaza's Shifa hospital showed several of the controversial weapons, known as flechettes, embedded in the 23-year-old Palestinian's chest and legs.
Several of the 3 cm (1 inch)-long darts were also found in Shana's flak jacket, emblazoned with a florescent "Press" sign, and in his vehicle, an unarmored sport utility vehicle bearing "TV" and "Press" markings.
Several hundred people, mainly local journalists, marched in Shana's funeral procession on Thursday. His body was draped in a Palestinian flag and his shattered camera and flak jacket were borne aloft on a separate stretcher.

25 April - Iraq - Jassim al-Batat
Assailants gunned down an Iraqi journalist who had been working for a local radio station run by a Shiite political party that is the chief rival of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the station and police said.
Jassim al-Batat, 38, was killed by gunmen in a speeding car as he left his house in the town of Qurna in his own car, said Adnan al-Asadi, the head of the local al-Nakhil radio station based in the southern city of Basra. Qurna is 55 miles north of Basra.
Al-Nakhil radio is run by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. Its leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim has sided with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki since Iraqi security forces launched a crackdown on al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in Basra a month ago.

4 May - Iraq - Tharwat Abdul-Wahab
Unidentified gunmen killed an Iraqi female journalist working for the Muraseloon (correspondents) news agency in eastern Mosul city, police said.
"On Sunday, unknown gunmen opened fire on Sirwa Abdul-Wahab, a journalist working for the Baghdad-based Muraseloon news agency while heading for work in al-Bakr neighborhood, eastern Mosul, killing her instantly," a security source, who asked not to be named, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI).
Abdul-Wahab "wrote for many Iraqi local newspapers and worked in the elections committee." Meanwhile, Ibrahim al-Siraji, the chairman of an Iraqi association advocating journalists' rights, told VOI that Abdul-Wahab was a member of the association's Mosul branch.
Born in 1972, Abdul-Wahab worked for the Tikrit-based Salah al-Din TV channel.
Mosul, the capital of Ninewa province, lies 405 km north of Baghdad.