ISLAMABAD — Pakistan has reported the killing of an eighth journalist in 2024 and is poised to encounter its deadliest year for media practitioners.

The latest victim is Malik Hassan Zaib, a 40-year-old reporter with a privately owned newspaper in Peshawar, the capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan.

Area police officials said that Zaib and his brother were traveling through the nearby Nowshera district last Sunday when two unidentified gunmen on a motorbike intercepted their car and fatally shot the journalist.

He is the third journalist to die in the violence-hit Pakistani province this year, bringing the number of media workers killed nationwide in 2024 to eight.

The intensified violence against journalists has outraged national and international media freedom advocates, who are demanding that Islamabad investigate and bring to justice those responsible.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a U.S.-based global media rights group, denounced Zaib’s murder, saying that it was alarmed by the surge in the killing of journalists in the South Asian nation.

“Authorities in Pakistan must immediately end this horrifying wave of violence and hold the perpetrators of the killing of journalist Malik Hassan Zaib to account,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, the CPJ program director.

He added, “The continued impunity for those who attack journalists is creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in Pakistan, which prevents the practice of free and independent journalism.”

The CPJ said that it is investigating the motives behind the attacks.

There have been no claims of responsibility for the violence, and local activists said that at least half of the journalists were killed because of their reporting.

The Press Emblem Campaign, a Geneva-based international media safety and rights organization, condemned Zaib’s killing and expressed its dismay over the relentless deadly attacks on journalists in Pakistan. It noted that Zaib became the 71st journalist to be murdered in the world in 2024.

Blaise Lempen, the PEC president, pressed Pakistani authorities to apprehend the reporter’s killers and punish them under the law.

“We extend our moral support to the agitating Pakistani media bodies for justice to the victim,” Lempen said. He demanded that “the culture of immunity to the murders must be demolished in Pakistan as early as possible.”

The PEC, in its statement, also identified all eight journalists Pakistan lost to assailants thus far in 2024. Four of them were killed in May alone.