The home of Antônio Fabiano Portilho Coene, the owner of Portal i9 news website, was attacked on the night of 29 November 2012. Portilho suspects that the attack on his home could be a reprisal for Portal i9’s publication of influence-trafficking allegations.
(RSF/IFEX) – 3 December 2012 – Reporters Without Borders calls for urgent protection for Antônio Fabiano Portilho Coene, the owner of Portal i9 news website, whose home in Campo Grande, the capital of the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, was attacked on the night of 29 November 2012.
Unidentified gunmen fired shots at the building and threw a Molotov cocktail into the courtyard, but fortunately they caused no injuries. A hammer was left outside with a message that read: “Fabiano Carvalhinho beaten to death.”
The message may have been an allusion to the murder of fellow Campo Grande-based journalist, Eduardo Carvalho, the owner and editor of the Ultima Hora News (UHNews) website, who was gunned down on 21 November.
Portilho suspects that the attack on his home could be a reprisal for Portal i9’s publication of the same influence-trafficking allegations that Carvalho had published in UHNews on the eve of his murder.
Reporters Without Borders urges the authorities to carry out a full investigation into the attack on Portilho’s home, and points out the that investigations into the Carvalho murder and into Paulo Rocaro’s murder on 12 February in this same high-risk region have yet to yield results.
A total of 11 journalists have been murdered in Brazil since the start of 2012. The murder motive has been clearly linked to the victim’s work in five of these cases.
