SOMALIA – Young freelancer shot dead in Mogadishu after returning from exile

Reporters Without Borders

13 August 2012

Reporters Without Borders is dismayed to learn that Mohamud Ali Keyre, a journalist also known as “Buneyste,” was killed by a gunshot yesterday evening in Mogadishu. He was the eighth journalist to be killed this year in Somalia.

“At this rate, 2012 could become the deadliest year of the past decade for media personnel in Somalia,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The country has already reached the 2007 toll of eight dead and is fast approaching the 2009 record of nine dead.

“We offer our heartfelt condolences to the entire Somali journalistic community and we urge the authorities to do everything possible to find those responsible and punish them severely. Bringing them to justice could finally deter the media’s enemies from continuing to decimate journalists with complete impunity.”

Keyre was hit in the head by a bullet that, according to witnesses and fellow journalists, may have been fired by a government soldier. He was taken to Mogadishu’s Madina hospital where doctors pronounced him dead.

Aged 23, Keyre worked as a freelancer for the Horyaalmedia.com news website. He used to work for Voice of Democracy, a Mogadishu-based radio station, until he fled to Kenya after getting death threats. He had recently returned after deciding that the security situation had improved in the Somali capital.

Yusuf Ali Osman, a former journalist working for the federal transitional government’s ministry of information, posts and telecommunications, was also killed in Mogadishu yesterday. Known as “Farey,” he was gunned down in the district of Dharkenley. The onetime director of Radio Mogadishu, he was in charge of media affairs at the ministry.