Unknown gunmen assassinated a female journalist working for an Iraqi news agency in the city of Mosul on Sunday, a local police source said.

"Unknown gunmen shot dead Sarwah Abdul-Wahab, a female journalist, in the al-Baker neighborhood in eastern Mosul," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

She was heading to her work in the morning when the attackers opened fire on her, the source said.

Wahab, 36, was working for the Baghdad-based Murasilon News Agency and is a member of the Iraqi Journalists' Rights Defending Association (IJRDA), a local media watchdog, her colleague in the city told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

A source in the IJRDA in Mosul told Xinhua that Wahab told her colleagues that her life was threatened after she felt that unknown people were chasing her.

Wahab also worked for Salahudin local television in Tikrit City for a year, but she left the work and return to Mosul for security reasons. She also worked for several local newspapers, the IJRDA source said.

On Friday, the Journalistic Freedom Observatory (JFO), another Iraqi media watchdog, said in a report that violations against journalists and media workers in Iraq during the period of May 2007 to May 2008 went up by 60 percent compared with the same period last year.

The JFO said that 197 violations against journalists have been registered during the past 12 months, namely a violation every 43 hours.

The international watchdog Reporters Without Borders listed Iraq as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists and media workers with at least 235 killed the country since the start of U.S.-led war in March 2003.

Statistics of the Iraqi Union of Journalists show that more than 250 of its members and media workers have been killed during the period.

(Xinhua News Agency May 5, 2008)