Gunmen killed a tabloid newspaper photographer and two leftwing activists in three separate shootings in the Philippines, the national police said yesterday.

Nearly 1,000 leftist activists, community organisers, lawyers and journalists have either gone missing or been murdered since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo came to power in 2001 and her government has been criticised for failing to stop the killings. 

Photojournalist Vic Melendrez was walking down a narrow alley outside his house in a suburb north of Manila yesterday morning when three gunmen shot him in the chest and the back, the ninth murder of a journalist this year. 

“We’re still verifying the motive for the killing,” Moises Guevarra, the city police chief, told reporters. “It could be personal. We’re looking at a possible connection with the murder of his cousin in May.” Melendrez’s cousin, also a tabloid photographer, was killed in an ambush in the same suburb but police have said his murder was not work-related. 

The Philippines is one of the most dangerous places to work as a reporter with around 10 journalists killed in 2005, most of them in the restive south, where Manila is fighting communist and Muslim insurgencies. Joe Torres, a spokesman for the National Union of Journalists in the Philippines, said Melendrez was the 46th journalist to be murdered since Arroyo came to power. 

Most of the murders were related to investigations of graft, narcotics and other illegal activities. Yesterday, a leftist student leader in the central Philippine Bicol region and a community organiser in the northern mountain province of Kalinga were killed by gunmen. 

Despite government’s promises to stop the killings and cash rewards, only a handful of murders have been solved by police.