A woman holds a lantern with a picture of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia outside the law court in Valletta, Malta, on October 17, 2017. (AFP / Matthew Mirabelli)
Paris: The murder of top Slovak reporter Jan Kuciak adds to the toll of journalists killed in Europe over the past several years, although the region remains the safest for the profession.
Here is a summary since 1990.
Recent killings
In a grisly case in August 2017, 30-year-old Swedish reporter Kim Wall is killed on board a submarine belonging to inventor Peter Madsen, subsequently charged with her murder. Wall's remains are found over a series of weeks in Denmark's Koge Bay, weighed down by metal objects, after she vanished while interviewing Madsen.
One of Malta's most prominent public figures and anti-corruption blogger, 53-year-old Daphne Caruana Galizia dies in a car bombing outside her home in October 2017. Her death prompts national soul-searching over whether the island's economic boom has brought with it a wave of corruption and organised crime.
Twelve members of the staff at France's satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are gunned down in January 2015 by two brothers who vow allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
Socratis Guiolias, a 37-year-old radio station director and formerly an editor on one of Greece's main scandal-hunting television shows, is assassinated in front of his home in Athens in July 2010. The extreme-left Revolutionary Sect group claims responsibility for the killing.
Safest zone: Europe
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) records more than 2,500 deaths of journalists on the job since 1990, taking into account both journalists and other media staff.
Over this period, the IFJ counts more than 350 deaths in Europe, making it the least dangerous zone for reporters.
Nearly two-thirds of these have taken place in Russia -- including the high-profile assassination in 2006 of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya -- and in Turkey and during the Balkan wars.
Reporters Without Borders notes in 2017 the killing of several European journalists covering conflicts abroad, including France's Stephan Villeneuve, Switzerland's Veronique Robert and Turkey's
Tuba Akyilmaz, all in Iraq, and British filmmaker Mehmet Aksoy who was listed as a "citizen journalist" in Syria.
Deadliest zones: Iraq, Philippines
Between 1990 and 2015, the IFJ lists more than 600 journalists killed on the job in the Asia-Pacific region, more than 500 in the Middle East and Arab world, more than 500 in the Americas and more than 400 in Africa.
The most deaths occur in conflict-ridden Iraq (336), the Philippines (153) and Mexico (145).
In its 2017 annual report, Reporters Without Borders registers 65 deaths worldwide, including 50 journalists, seven bloggers and eight media staff.
This is a decline of 18 percent compared with 2016 due, it says, to "a growing awareness of the need to protect journalists" and also because journalists are avoiding countries that have become "too dangerous", such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.
