On March 18, 2009, Omid Reza Mir Sayafi became the first blogger to die in prison. A culture blogger, he was imprisoned in the vicious Evin prison outside Tehran and either killed outright or at least allowed to die. He was followed on April 9 of this year by Bahraini blogger Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri, who perished following a beating.
Now 36-year-old Brazilian blogger Ednaldo Figueira joins these two poor souls. Figueira, however, was not in prison. He was shot down in the streets of his home town, Serra do Mel.
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After receiving death threats, Figueira was shot six times on June 15 by gunmen on motorcycles outside his workplace, according to Reporters Without Borders.
In addition to being a blogger, Figueira was also the publisher of the newspaper O Serrano and a politician in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. He was the head of the Serra do Mel branch of the Workers Party, the same party of former Brazilian president Ignacio Lula de Silva and the current president, Dilma Rousseff.
He was a vocal opponent of Serro do Mel’s mayor, Josivan Bibiano de Azevedo of the center-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party. In his newspaper, Figueira had recently published an expose of the city’s finances. In his blog, he frequently commented on corruption issues.
Ricardo Gama
Ricardo Gama
Figueira was not the first Brazilian blogger to be shot. Although thankfully he survived, Ricardo Gama, 40, was shot by gunmen in a car in the streets of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood in March. He was struck in the head, neck and shoulder.
On his blog, Gama, like Figueira, was highly critical of city politics and corruption among the city’s political classes, including alleged connections to drug gangs.
Figueira photo from blog serro do mel
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