Radio broadcaster killed in southern Philippines

COTABATO CITY – A radio broadcaster has been found dead in the southern Philippines, becoming the country’s sixth journalist to be killed this year, officials and colleagues said Wednesday.

Soldiers recovered the decomposing remains of Eddie Apostol in a marsh on Sunday, five days after his family reported him missing, said regional military spokesman Colonel Prudencio Asto.

The 52-year-old DXND radio talk show host had been bound in rope and shot twice in the head, Asto told reporters.

Nestor Burgos, chairman of the media watchdog National Union for Journalists of the Philippines, told AFP it was not immediately clear if the killing was related to Apostol’s work.

Apostol hosted a talk show discussing development issues, the union said.

“We always consider journalist killings here as possibly work-related,” Burgos said.

Outspoken journalists are routinely attacked in the Philippines, which watchdogs say is one of the most dangerous places in the world for members of the press.

The union said Apostol was the sixth journalist to be killed in the Philippines this year, four of whom were considered to have been killed because of their work, journalist union official Rowena Paraan told AFP.

The latest killing occurred in the province of Maguindanao, where members of a prominent Muslim political clan are on trial for the November 2009 murders of 57 people including 32 media workers.

A total of 153 media workers have killed in the Philippines in the pursuit of their profession since 1986, Paraan said.