Bangkok, December 21, 2016--The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on authorities in the Philippines to establish the motive behind the murder of newspaper publisher Larry Que and bring the perpetrators swiftly to justice.

Que was shot in the head at close range at around 10:00 a.m. on December 19 while entering an office building in Catanduanes province's town of Virac, according to news reports. A gunman wearing a helmet, bonnet, and raincoat escaped on a motorcycle driven by an accomplice, reports said. Que died early yesterday morning while receiving treatment for his injury at the Eastern Bicol Medical Center.

Que was publisher and columnist at the local Catanduanes News Now, a weekly community newspaper established this year, according to local reports. He was also the owner of a local insurance company and ran for mayor of Virac in an election he lost in May, reports said. Teresa Reyes, an off-duty police officer who witnessed the crime, said Que was returning from the local Land Transportation Office when he was shot in front of his company's office building, reports said.

"Philippine authorities should quickly apprehend the assailants and determine the motive behind publisher Larry Que's murder," said Shawn Crispin, CPJ's senior Southeast Asia representative. "President Rodrigo Duterte has sent mixed messages on his government's commitment to protecting journalists and upholding press freedom. He should set the record straight by quickly solving Que's killing through legal means."

In October, Duterte created by executive order a new multi-agency government task force to probe unresolved media murder cases and prevent violence against journalists, according to press reports.

Que was shot soon after his newspaper published a column he wrote alleging "official negligence" over an illegal methamphetamine laboratory recently raided by police in the island province, news reports said. The article also speculated that the illegal plant, reportedly the largest ever discovered in the Philippines, may have been established by Chinese nationals working with ethnic Chinese residents of the province, reports said.

Jinky Tabor, a broadcast journalist who also reports for the local Manila Bulletin newspaper, said that she received anonymous death threats after reporting on the police raid of the alleged drug-making facility, according to news reports. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, a local press group, said in a statement that Que's murder had sowed fear among local journalists that they could be targeted next for reporting on the laboratory.

The Philippines ranks fourth on CPJ's Impunity Index, a global measure of countries where journalists are slain and the killers go free. More journalists have been killed in direct relation to their work in the Philippines than anywhere apart from Iraq and Syria since CPJ began keeping detailed records in 1992.</s>National Union of Journalists of the Philippines

 Statement

 December 20, 2016

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines condemns the murder of Larry Que, publisher of Catanduanes News Now, and challenge authorities, particularly the Presidential Task Force on Violations of the Right to Life, Liberty and Security of the Members of the Media, to immediately solve his killing, the first of a media person under the Duterte administration.

According to the NUJP’s Catanduanes chapter, Que was shot in the head by a gunman as he was about to enter the building that houses his insurance office late Monday morning and died around 1:45 a.m.on Tuesday.

His murder came after his column in Catanduanes News Now, of which he was publisher for only two weeks, in which he criticized what he called local officials’ alleged negligence, which allowed the setting up on the island-province of a recently raided shabu laboratory that authorities claimed was the “biggest” so far discovered in the country.

The NUJP-Catanduanes reports that, aside from Que’s murder, at least one other journalist, broadcaster Jinky Tabor, who acted as a witness to the raid on the laboratory, has also received threats.

These have created a climate of fear within the local media community.

It should be stressed that the murder of Que is not the first assault on journalists under the current administration.

On the day of Duterte’s inauguration, motorcycle-riding gunmen shot and wounded Saturnino “Jan” Estanio of Radio Mindanao Network’s dxRS in Surigao City and his 12-year old son. A bystander was also slightly injured in the incident.

And last month, Pangasinan journalist Virgilio Maganes survived an attempt on his life by gunmen who apparently attempted to disguise the hit as drug-related. They left behind a cardboard placard that said: “Wag nyo akung tularan drug posher ako (sic).”

Thus far, we have to hear back from authorities despite the creation of task forces to investigate these thankfully botched assassination attempts.

It has not helped that Duterte, who has shown a total aversion to criticism, and some of his officials have time and again been openly hostile towards journalists and the media as a whole, with his loyal supporters taking up the cue and heaping insults, curses and even threats through social media on several of our colleagues.

Nor has it helped that an army of trolls and social media operators are waging a campaign of lies through fake news sites that they tout as their “people’s alternative” to “biased” media or that Duterte’s spokesmen are forever having to explain his statements and blaming media for failing to see beyond what they insist is “hyperbole” or, alternately, to apply “creative imagination.”

We call on this administration to walk the talk and prove its professed respect for press freedom, not only by quickly solving these brazen assaults on press freedom but, just as importantly, by ending its penchant of falsely blaming media for deliberately misinterpreting its often inconsistent and incoherent messages and instead working on making its communications crystal-clear.
A news publisher is allegedly killed in the Philippine province of Catanduanes after publishing a story about the controversial drug purge campaign.