Police say a senior Indian journalist was fatally shot by unidentified attackers in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru.

Police say the assailants pumped bullets into Gauri Lankesh on Tuesday as she left her car after reaching her home in Bengaluru, the Karnataka state capital. The attackers fled the scene.

Top police officer R.K. Dutta said it was too early to say who killed her. He said he had met Lankesh recently, but she did not talk of any threat to her life.

According to the Hindustan Times, Lankesh, the editor of weekly tabloid Lankesh Patrike, was known to be a critic of right-wing groups and Sangh organisations. She often criticised communal violence, HT reported.

She was recently found responsible in a defamation case by a lawmaker of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for her writing about Hindu nationalists.

In 2015, an Indian scholar, Malleshappa M. Kalburgi, was killed in a similar way, also in Bengaluru. He was a critic of religious superstition.