Mapping every journalist killed in South Asia
since 1992

By Aadit Tambe

Data current as of Oct. 24, 2021

167 journalists have been killed in South Asian countries — which include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives — since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ’s 2020 Global Impunity Index spotlights countries where journalists are singled out for murder and their killers go free, showed that three out of the top 12 countries — Bangladesh, India and Pakistan — are located in South Asia.

Curruption, weak institutions, and lack of political will to pursue robust investigations were factors behind impunity in most countries on the list. Some cases that were thought to be resolved were upended. Last year, Pakistan's Sindh High Court overturned the murder convictions of four men accused of killing Daniel Pearl, a South Asia correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

CPJ defines journalists as people who cover news or comment on public affairs in print, in photographs, on radio, on television, or online. Writers, editors, publishers, producers, technicians, photographers, camera operators, and directors of news organizations are all included.

The following interactive map plots the killing of every journalist in South Asia since 1992 — click on the dots to read their stories:

Methodology and sources

This is my first news application developed after completing the First News App tutorial. I wrote a web scraper to collect data from the Committee to Protect Journalists website to obtain biographical descriptions of each journalist's death. Using the GeoPy package, I converted locations to geographical coordinates — after cleaning and analyzing the data in pandas.

My analysis can be found in this jupyter notebook.

In addition to the First News App tutorial, thank you to the following resources for inspiration:

• Indian finance authorities raid offices of Newslaundry and Newsclick websites
• Journalists killed ‘in retaliation for their work’ globally doubles this year to 21 — Report
• Murders of journalists more than double worldwide

Note: Geographic locations are generated by GeoPy and may be approximate. Certain coordinates were changed manually to accomodate multiple points in the same town/city.