Online Desk: A group of assailants killed a Colombian journalist in a motorcycle drive-by shooting after the government withdrew his security detail despite threats to his life, a rights group and police said on Monday.

Rafael Moreno directed the news site Voces de Cordoba in the northern municipality of Montelibano, where he was killed late Sunday.

On its Facebook page, the site wrote: ‘They have forever silenced the voice of truth.’

‘We know that (Moreno) was carrying out several investigations into criminal and disciplinary complaints,’ the Cordoberxia Social Foundation, a rights watchdog, said in a statement announcing the journalist’s murder.

Police official John Fredy Suarez said Moreno was killed in a public place by two assassins on a motorcycle.

Last month, Moreno complained that the government had withdrawn security escorts assigned to him after he received threats.

He had been investigating, among other subjects, allegations of an illegal quarry on a senator’s estate from which extracted materials were being used in public works.

Pedro Vaca, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’s special rapporteur for freedom of expression, condemned the killing on Twitter.

‘It has been reported that his protection scheme was withdrawn and this accentuates the duty to investigate and punish those responsible,’ he said.

Colombia’s prosecuting authority has announced the creation of a special investigation team.

According to Colombia’s Foundation for Press Freedom, violence against journalists in the country has been on the rise, with nearly 770 falling victim to some form of aggression in 2021.

In August this year, another two journalists were shot dead by assailants in the northern town of Fundacion on the Caribbean coast, bringing to 10 the number of reporters killed in Colombia since a peace accord with leftist FARC rebels was signed in 2016.