The general director of a local independent radio station in Mogadishu and another colleague have been brutally assassinated Saturday in Somalia, apparently for criticizing the poor conditions of Somali people today and the people responsible for it. They are Ali Iman Sharmarke, the owner of the Somali media group HornAfrik, and Mahad Ahmed Elmi, who hosted a popular radio talk show for the same company.

Ali Iman Sharmarke was killed with a remote bomb while coming back from Mahad Ahmed Elmi's funeral, who had been shot to death just a few hours earlier. Over the weekend another journalist was reportedly attacked and six media workers have been killed in Somalia so far this year, according to the records kept by Reporters sans Frontieres.

Already the next day, Sunday, the authorities have arrested two suspects, but they did not identify them. "These men are in the hands of police forces," Mogadishu mayor Mohamed Dheere said. "They are being investigated."

It's quite difficult to know which faction killed the two, as HornAfrik criticized both the government and the Islamic militants as being more or less equally criminal. Somalia has no actual functioning leadership structure since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, because afterwards they turned on each other in a bloody ongoing fight for power.

"The transitional government must take urgent steps to protect journalists and thoroughly investigate and punish these murders to prevent further killings," Paris-based Reporters sans Frontieres said in an official statement.

Reuters reported that shortly before his death, Ali Iman Sharmarke expressed his outrage at the shooting of his colleague Mahad Ahmed Elmi, saying the killers were criminals trying to stop the world hearing about their crimes. His HornAfrik is one of the few "windows" through which the outside world can look at the situation in the troubled country.