The International Press Institute (IPI) today called on authorities in Ukraine to fully investigate Wednesday night’s stabbing death of photojournalist Vitaliy Rozvadovsky in Kiev.

Voice of America reported that Rozvadovsky, a reporter with the Ukrainian weekly 2000, was attacked at the entrance to a Kiev building in what official media have described as a personal conflict.

The Kyiv Post said that the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s main office in Kiev told Interfax-Ukraine that Rozvadovsky received numerous stab wounds to the head and neck and that he died from loss of blood after being taken to a hospital.

According to Reporters Without Borders, a police spokesman said a suspect had been identified and that police were treating the death as “murder with premeditation”. The spokesman also told the group that “there is an 80 per cent probability that the murder is not linked to [Rozvadovsky’s] journalist activity”.

IPI Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie said: “Our condolences go out to Mr. Rozvadovsky’s family and colleagues. Given the lack of details released so far regarding his alleged assailant, we urge authorities to conduct a full and transparent investigation into this crime and not to discount any possible motives, including the possibility that he was targeted because of his work.”

The state of media freedom in Ukraine has been the subject of increasing concern by international groups. IPI in June completed a press freedom mission to the country which found that the country’s media was partly free and underscored a lack of respect for plural views, impunity in attacks on journalists and corruption at multiple levels of society, among other problems.

Last month, journalist Oleksandr Vlaschenko was left in critical condition after an attacker shot him in the head in a bus terminal in the city of Mykolayiv, approximately 130 kilometres northeast of Odessa.

The South and East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO), an IPI affiliate, supports this statement.