The Goa Union of Journalists, as well a Church organisation on Wednesday, condemned the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh.
In a protest meeting organised here, Union President Kishor Naik Gaonkar said that the murder of the Bengaluru-based journalist is not an attack on an individual journalist, but an attack on the principles this nation has been built on.
“The murder coming even as the perpetrators of other political killings — M.M Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar — continue to evade justice embolden and send signals that such killings can go ahead with impunity. In this context, it is imperative that the authorities act swiftly and arrest the culprits behind this murder and buck this alarming trend,” he said.
Lankesh, 55, was the editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a Kannada weekly tabloid. The Karnataka government has set up a Special Investigation Team to track down the killers, even as the family of the slain journalist have demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe.
In a statement issued here, the Council for Social Justice and Peace, which works as the social arm of Goa’s influential Roman Catholic Church, described the “cold-blooded” killing as a “cowardly act”.
“The intolerance unleashed on one pretext or the other appears to find tacit encouragement from the Union and State governments through its silence, thereby emboldening criminals to brazenly celebrate such crimes,” it said in a statement.
