KARACHI: A cameraman of a prominent Pakistani news channel was shot dead by motorcycle-borne Taliban gunmen who indiscriminately fired upon a news gathering van in the country's biggest port-city here.
The Digital Satellite News Gathering (DSNG) van of Samaa channel had gone to the North Nazimabad area of Karachi when it came under attack yesterday from gunmen on motorcycles who fired indiscriminately on the van. Police said that assistant cameraman Taimur received a bullet shot to the head during the attack.
"He was brought to the hospital with a single shot to the head and he died after a while," additional police surgeon, Rohina Hasan told the media. The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the attack. TTP spokesperson Mohammad Khorasani said in a statement, "The media is not impartial and we’ve issued several warnings to them." A spokesman for the channel said that the van had gone to the area to cover a cracker attack on a police van.
A senior police official, Farooq Malik said that the same suspects appeared to be involved in the attack on the DSNG van who had earlier also carried out attacks on DSNG vans of other channels in the same area. He said initial investigations indicated that the cracker attack on the police van was a ploy to get the media to the area to cover the incident and then attack them.
A DSNG van of the Samaa channel had also come under attack in September 2015, while another was attacked last year. In other attacks on television channel crew in Karachi, three gunmen had attacked a Geo TV DSNG, killing a Geo News employee and injuring another in 2015, while in 2014 three employees of the Express News channel were shot dead in an attack claimed by the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan.