May 31, 2002	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 18,1423

PARIS, May 30: International journalists’ rights association Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) has expressed its “serious concern” over the attempted murder of the journalist Zafar Iqbal in Srinagar.

In a letter to the Chief Minister of occupied Kashmir, Dr Farooq Abdullah, RSF asks that an investigation “be opened rapidly by the local police in order to identify the authors of this attempted murder.”

“In the present context of extreme tension in Kashmir,” writes Robert Menard, RSF secretary-general, in his letter to Dr Abdullah, “it is more than urgent to get right to the bottom of this homicide, whose authors should not remain unpunished.”

According to information gathered by RSF, Zafar Iqbal, a journalist at the independent English daily, Kashmir Images, was seriously injured by bullets on May 29 in his office in Srinagar.

The young journalist, who only recently finished his formal education, was writing an article when three individuals burst into his office asking for explanations about an article that had appeared on the front page of the daily that very morning.