Pakistani relatives transport the body of journalist Zaman Mehsud (center) after an attack by gunmen in Tank district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province yesterday. — AFP

PESHAWAR: A Pakistani journalist was shot dead by unknown attackers in the troubled northwest yesterday, police said, a region where reporters are frequently targeted by Islamist militants.

Zaman Mehsud, 40, was killed while riding his motorcycle to the remote Tank district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. "Zaman Mehsud was riding his motorcycle when gunmen awaiting along the road opened fire," Rasool Shah, a senior police official in Tank, told AFP.

He was critically wounded and died of his injuries in hospital, Shah added. He had been working for three Urdu-language newspapers covering the South Waziristan tribal district and surrounding areas.

Zafrul Islam, another senior government official, confirmed the incident and said Mehsud was hit by five bullets including one in the head. Police would not comment on the motive for the killing, but journalists in the region work under constant threat from Islamist rebels, mainly the Taleban.

The powerful military also stands accused of using its intelligence agencies to regularly harass and sometimes kill journalists, including Saleem Shahzad whose tortured corpse was discovered near the capital in 2011. A UN report issued Monday said at least 71 Pakistani journalists and other media workers have lost their lives since 2001 while pursuing their duties.

The report criticized a widespread culture of impunity and ranked Pakistan as the world's fifth worst country in terms of the number of unresolved cases of violence against journalists. The killing was the fourth attack on members of the media in the past three months. A TV news technician and journalist were killed in separate incidents in the port city of Karachi in September, while a journalist was shot and injured in the northwestern city of Peshawar. GLGL

Woman succumbs

A young Pakistani woman died yesterday after a rejected suitor set her ablaze for refusing his marriage proposal, a doctor said. Sonia Bibi, 20, was admitted to hospital last month, where she told police that her former lover Latif Ahmed had doused her with petrol and set her alight after she turned down his proposal.

Medical staff had originally said she would recover, but a doctor in Multan's Nishtar hospital told AFP that Bibi's injuries had become infected and that she died yesterday morning.

About 45 to 50 percent of her body had been burned in the attack, doctor Naheed Chaudhry, the head of the hospital's burns department told AFP. The incident took place in a remote village of Multan district in central Punjab province. Police have arrested the 24-year-old suspect.

Bibi had told police that she had fallen out of love with Ahmed, and preliminary investigations suggested he had set her on fire "after she refused to marry him". Hundreds of women are murdered in Pakistan each year in cases of domestic violence or on the grounds of defending family "honor". The Aurat Foundation, a campaign group that works to improve the lives of women in Pakistan's conservative and patriarchal society, says more than 3,000 women have been killed in such attacks since 2008. - AFP