BAGHDAD — A secular and outspoken Iraqi journalist was gunned down in his Baghdad home, a press freedom organization and the reporter’s father said Thursday. Raed Al-Juburi “was killed with a bullet to the heart. Another bullet hit his pillow,” said Ziad Al-Ajili from Iraq’s Journalistic Freedoms Observatory told AFP. He said Juburi was killed on Tuesday in his home in the capital’s Qadisiyah neighborhood. The motives behind the murder were not immediately clear but Ajili and some of Juburi’s colleagues said he knew he was threatened. He had recently given friends the observatory’s number for them to call in case something happened to him, Ajili said. Juburi, who hosted a TV show on Al-Rasheed channel and wrote a column in Azzaman newspaper, did not shy away from blaming politicians for Iraq’s security and economic woes. An Iraqi security spokesman had told Iraqiya state television that a preliminary investigation suggested Juburi might have committed suicide. But the dead journalist’s father said that was impossible. “The murder of my son was premeditated, it was not a suicide as some reports have suggested,” Wadallah Al-Juburi said. — AFP