The assassination of a ‘Brave Journalist of Afghanistan’

The night before he died, Aliyas Dayee was up late working. This was not unusual for Dayee, who didn't mind going to bed late or getting up early for a story. That night, he was finishing a radio report about an attack on an Afghan military checkpoint near Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, Afghanistan, where he lived.

Dayee, who was 33, was born and raised in Helmand and spent his working life covering the ebb and flow of violence between the military and the Taliban. In the months leading up to his death, the violence had been flowing. Even as peace talks got under way thousands of miles away in Qatar, with the aim of ending the war, Afghanistan was experiencing a surge in assassinations of people in public life.

Dayee eventually closed his laptop and went to bed, and in the morning he and his brother Mujtaba set off early to collect a Danish journalist he was helping with a radio report. Dayee had recently purchased a new car so he could drive his elderly mother to the hospital in greater comfort. He was diligent about checking its undercarriage for explosives - getting down on all fours no matter how short a time the car had been left unattended. His friends would joke to him that he was like a mouse - always alert, ready at any moment to dart away from danger.

The shopkeepers opposite Dayee's house said that he checked the car as usual that morning. But a magnetic "sticky bomb" had been placed inside the wheel arch, police told the family, where it was hard to spot, and it detonated shortly after the two brothers left the house, killing Dayee and wounding Mujtaba. Dayee's wife heard the explosion from the house and went running.