PARIS, Jan 5: The year 2004 was the deadliest in a decade for journalists around the world, mainly because of the number of reporters killed in Iraq, the media rights group Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) said on Wednesday.

At least 53 journalists and 15 media assistants (drivers, fixers, translators, technicians, security guards) were killed last year, the Paris-based group said. "For the second year running, Iraq was the world's most dangerous country for journalists," RSF said. "Nineteen reporters and 12 media assistants were killed there during the year. Terrorist strikes and Iraqi guerilla attacks were the main cause."

It added that the US army killed four of the reporters - employees of the Arab television stations Al Arabiya and Al Iraqiya - in incidents in March and April, it said. According to the RSF figures, the next most dangerous country for reporters was the Philippines, with six deaths, followed by Bangladesh, with four.

Those and other deaths in Asia were believed to be because the journalists were "investigating delicate matters such as corruption, drug-trafficking and gangsterism", RSF said.

The deaths in the Philippines occurred in areas outside Manila where a feudal system rife with drugs, gambling and corruption runs unchecked, Carlos Conde, secretary general of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, said last month.

Three journalists died in Mexico, while Russia, Nicaragua, Brazil, Peru, Sri Lanka and Nepal each recorded two deaths, the RSF report said. Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Gambia, Haiti, India, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia and Serbia-Montenegro each recorded one death.

The figures were the highest published by RSF since 1995, when 64 journalists were killed around the world. In comparison, 40 journalists and two media assistants were killed in 2003.

The full RSF Press Freedom report can be found on the www.rsf.org website. The organization said that, according to its figures, at least 907 journalists were arrested around the world last year, 1,146 were attacked or threatened and at least 622 media were censored.

It noted that several journalists were still missing, including a French cameraman working for the British network ITN who disappeared at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and an Iraqi in that country who vanished last August.

A Canadian-French journalist in Ivory Coast has not been heard from since last April, and four journalists have been kidnapped by Maoist rebels in Nepal, RSF said. The Middle East generally had a "very delicate" situation regarding press freedom, the report said, saying Iran routinely arrested journalists and political instability in the Palestinian territories proved dangerous to news media.

In Asia, several countries were singled out as having "the least press freedom in the world", namely North Korea, Myanmar, China, Vietnam and Laos. In Europe, government control of national television in Russia gave rise to "flagrantly biased" coverage of the school hostage drama in the southern city of Beslan, where nearly 350 people - half of them children - were killed in September.

The contested presidential elections in Ukraine also saw attacks on the press, and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko "made every effort to systematically silence the few dissident voices" in his country, it said.

Turkey, which last month was given the go-ahead to start EU membership negotiations, made "striking progress" in passing laws to bring its media standards up to western European levels, "but in practice these measures have not yet significantly improved press freedom", RSF said. -AFP