Colombia journalist killed, fourth in two weeks

CNN
July 10, 2001

Colombia journalist killed, fourth in two weeks

                 BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A television reporter was shot and killed in a
                 bar in the Pacific port of Buenaventura, the fourth journalist assassinated
                 in the past two weeks in Colombia.

                 Colleagues said the killing of Jorge Enrique Urbano, 53, may not have been
                 related to his activities as a reporter for a weekly news magazine show on
                 Buenaventura's Canal 2 TV.

                 Urbana also worked full time for the port city located 215 miles west of the
                 capital, Bogota, and had been involved in controversy over a move to clear out a
                 public park.

                 "We think that the motives may come from his efforts to remove street vendors
                 from the park," Osvaldo Viera, director of the TV show whe re Urbano worked,
                 told The Associated Press.

There have been no arrests and police have not named any suspects.

                 On Friday, gunmen killed Jose Dubiel Vasquez, news director of Voice of the
                 Jungle Radio in the southern state of Caqueta. Vasquez had replaced a news
                 director who was killed last December.

                 On July 4, a gunman fatally shot Arquimides Arias Henao, a radio station
                 director in the city of Fresno, in western Tolima state. Pablo Emilio Parra,
                 director of a community radio show in Tolima, was killed June 26. The army
                 accused leftist guerrillas of shooting Parra.

                 Colombia, plagued by 37 years of civil war, is one of the most hazardous places
                 in the world to be a journalist. Last year, 12 journalists were killed here,
                 according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.