DHAKA, Feb 19: Journalists across Bangladesh called on the government on Saturday to step up efforts to track down culprits behind "regular" killings of media figures as they demanded greater protection.

"We ask the government to protect our lives and ensure a peaceful environment to conduct professional duty," Reazuddin Ahmed, convenor of the Forum to Protect Journalists (FPJ), told a rally of journalists in the capital Dhaka.

"Journalists are killed regularly, yet the government has yet to find the criminals. We ask the government to catch the killers and punish them," Ahmed said. Similar rallies were held in other cities and towns across Bangladesh to protest against the killing of journalist Sheikh Belaluddin Ahmed in a February 5 bomb blast at a press club in Khulna. Three journalists were wounded in the blast.

Belaluddin Ahmed was the 14th journalist in the past nine years to be killed in the Khulna region, among Bangladesh's most crime-prone areas. Khulna Press Club president Humayun Kabir Balu and Manik Shaha, bureau chief of the English-language New Age newspaper and freelancer for the BBC, were killed in bomb attacks last year.

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has urged the government to do more to protect journalists, especially in the Khulna region where it said "journalists are constantly the targets of extreme violence." -AFP