Two unidentified men kidnapped television journalist Paola Mallea on Sunday, 29 November, and kept her locked in a room for over nine hours before leaving her on the outskirts of her home city of Santa Cruz, reports local media organisation the Asociación Nacional de Prensa (ANP).

Mallea, a journalist at the Santa Cruz-based broadcaster PAT, was in her car at the time of the kidnapping. The two men got into her vehicle and took her to an unknown location, where they kept her locked and tied in a room until the following morning.

This was the second attack on Mallea within a week.

On 27 November, two days before the kidnapping, an unidentified man approached Mallea in the street and asked her if she worked for PAT.

When she replied that she did, the man pulled a knife and tried to stab her in the face, reports ANP.

Mallea managed to block the attack with her hand, which needed medical treatment afterwards.

Usually a reporter on her station’s entertainments team, Mallea had been helping to cover a previous attack on PAT employees Shirley Flores and Karen Paola Rueda, during which an elite police unit allegedly chased, shot at, physically assaulted and briefly detained the two journalists, who were covering an unrelated abduction story.

The journalists’ driver was shot in the leg during the attack. Five police officers have since been suspended pending investigation.

Asked about Mallea’s kidnapping, Juan Javier Zabellos, ANP’s Executive Director, said: “The government has to investigate the causes of this kidnapping. It’s highly suspicious that a journalist covering an assault by the police is attacked, and then abducted.”

“We ask ourselves, is it civilians, or police officers themselves who are behind these attacks?”

“This series of violent assaults on PAT journalists is outright unacceptable, and a further sign of deteriorating press freedom in Bolivia,” said Alison Bethel-McKenzie, IPI Deputy Director.

“The assailants must not be allowed to escape unpunished. The authorities must do everything they can to protect journalists like Mallea, by bringing the perpetrators to justice.”