The director of the Internet site of Mexico’s Radio Vision, Norberto Miranda, was killed last week by a group of five gunmen who entered his office in Nuevo Casas Grandes, near Ciudad Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua.

The gunmen asked for Miranda, who identified himself and was gunned down in front of his colleagues.

Miranda is the fifth journalist to be killed this year in Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters.

According to IPI’s Death Watch figures more than 30 journalists have been murdered in Mexico in the last 10 years.

“This is yet another sickening murder in a long line of unsolved murders of journalists,” said IPI Director David Dadge. “The Mexican government’s failure to stop this trend undermines confidence in the rule of law and fuels the belief that journalists can be murdered at will.”

According to news reports, Miranda, who hosted a radio show and wrote columns under the pseudonym of “El Gallito,“ had recently covered crimes attributed to the local drug cartel, El Cartel de Juarez. On 22 September, just days before he was murdered, his column noted that 25 people had been killed in the municipality of Nuevo Casas Grandes since the beginning of the month, allegedly in acts of retaliation by the Juárez drug cartel.

Two days before the murder, on the morning of 21 September, the body of freelance photographer Jaime Omar Gándara San Martín was found in Chihuahua. He had been stabbed in the back. The motive behind Gandara’s murder was not immediately clear.

Two officials investigating the 13 November 2008 murder of El Diario journalist Armando Rodríguez in Ciudad Juarez were themselves murdered in July and August of this year.

Raul Lechuga, the Head of Information at El Diario de Chihuahua in Chihuahua told IPI: “Because of the dangers of covering the police beat and drug-related crimes and corruption in northern Mexico, journalists do censor themselves. Journalists may choose not to have their names published with their stories for fear of reprisal.”

In April 2008, IPI joined the International Press Freedom and Freedom of Expression Mission to Mexico to evaluate the press freedom situation in the country. The mission found that the main obstacles to the free exercising of journalism in Mexico are: organised crime; corruption; impunity; direct attacks by the police and military forces; and the lack of political will on the part of federal and state governments to resolve cases of assaults on journalists and to guarantee their safety.