A journalist for VOA was killed near his office this week in Kyrgyzstan, in the city where he was born.
The organization said 26-year-old Alisher Saipov reported for VOA’s Uzbek language service “on a variety of sensitive political issues critical to the audience throughout Central Asia.”
Broadcast Board of Governors Chairman James Glassman called for an investigation. VOA said preliminary information is that the writer “was shot dead at close range some time after 6 p.m. local time in Osh.”
Saipov’s reporting, VOA said, focused on the Ferghana Valley that straddles Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism.