20 March 2007
RADIO REPORTER GUNNED DOWN IN APPARENT CONTRACT KILLING
A radio journalist gunned down in front of his family may have been killed because of his work, report the Institute for Press and Society (Institute Prensa y Sociedad, IPYS), Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières, RSF) and the International Freedom of Journalists affiliate Asociación Nacional de Periodistas del Perú (ANP).
Miguel Pérez Julca was returning to his home in Jaén, northwestern Peru, with his wife and two children on the evening of 16 March, when two gunmen on a motorcycle shot him twice in the head. He died while being rushed to hospital. His wife, Nelly Guevara Arrascue, was shot in the left knee.
Pérez worked for "El Informativo del Pueblo", a news programme on Radio Exitos, and contributed to two other local stations, Radio Oriental and Radio Jaén. Pérez, who covered local corruption and violent crime stories, had recently blamed Jaén mayor Jaime Vilchez Oblitas for several cases of mismanagement. The day before his murder, he told friends he had seen a white car following him on the street.
"He was looking into local corruption, he said he was being followed just before his death, and his murderers behaved like contract killers," said RSF. "For all these reasons the investigators should work on the assumption he was killed because of his reporting, even if that upsets the local government."
The daily "La República" reported that several witnesses had identified the killers as being local criminals but no arrests had been made.
IPYS reports that the Minister of Interior has ordered a special unit of the national police to investigate the murder. Pérez is the first journalist to be murdered in Peru since 2004.
Pérez made headlines in 1991, when he was wrongly arrested on charges of terrorism. He spent two years in prison awaiting trial. In 1993, he was acquitted, but the decision was later annulled and he was arrested on the same charges in 1996. He was released two days later, following the intervention of a Peruvian congresswoman, local press freedom organisations and colleagues.
Visit these sites:
- RSF: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21351
- IPYS: http://www.ipys.org/alertas/atentado.php?id=1055
- ANP: http://www.anp.org.pe/
- IFEX 1996 Alert: http://www.ifex.org/20fr/content/view/full/78018
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