The head of one of Somalia’s most popular radio stations, Horn Afrik, was fatally shot by three masked gunmen in the capital, Mogadishu, Shabelle Radio reported.
Said Tahlil Ahmed was killed on Wednesday as he and other journalists were walking to a press conference called by Somalia’s main insurgent group, Al Shabaab.
The director of Shabelle Radio, Mukhtar Mohamed Hirabe, was also injured in the attack. Tahlil was appointed director of Horn Afrik after its founder, Ali Sharmarke, was killed in a roadside bombing in Mogadishu in August 2007.
Eleven journalists have been murdered in Somalia since 2007, four of whom worked for Horn Afrik.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the murder. It said local journalists had told the committee that Al Shabaab had been unhappy about local media coverage of last week’s presidential election.
However, Al Shabaab denied it had killed Tahlil and said it would find whoever was responsible.
Members of parliament meeting on Saturday in neighbouring Djibouti elected moderate Islamist Shaikh Sharif Shaikh Ahmed.
Shaikh Sharif was the head of the Islamic Courts’ Union (ICU), which ruled Mogadishu for six months in 2006 before being ousted by invading Ethiopian forces. Al Shabaab, a splinter group of the ICU, opposes the new president.The Ethiopian invasion sparked a bloody insurgency, which has claimed the lives of more than 16,000 civilians and displaced about one million.