Another Sri Lankan newspaper editor was attacked this morning while driving to work near Colombo, the capital, just over two weeks after the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper.
Upali Tennakoon, chief editor of the Rivira weekly, was driving on the outskirts of Colombo with his wife when two men on motorbikes pulled up in front of his car and told him to get out, according to a reporter on the paper.
When he refused, they smashed the car window and attacked him and his wife with wooden clubs and a knife, Stanley Samarasinghe, a senior journalist at Rivira, told The Times.
The two assailants escaped on their motorbikes and Mr Tennakoon and his wife were taken to hospital, where they are in a stable condition, Mr Samarasinghe said.
It was the latest in a series of attacks on Sri Lankan journalists, many of them fatal, since the government launched a military campaign to defeat the Tamil Tiger rebels after a ceasefire unravelled in 2006.
Most, including Wickrematunge's murder, have been blamed on the government, which has failed properly to investigate many of the attacks despite repeated requests from the international community.
Wickrematunge, one of the government's most outspoken critics, was also attacked by unidentified men on motorbikes, who shot him in the head while he was driving to work in Colombo on January 8. 
Three days after his death, his newspaper published what it said was a self-written obituary in which he accused the government of assassinating him because of his criticism of its military campaign against the Tigers.
Two days before his death, unidentified gunmen had also attacked and partially destroyed the headquarters of MTV, a private television station that had been criticised in state media for its coverage of the campaign.
However, Mr Samarsinghe said it was unclear who was behind this morning's attack as Mr Tennakoon had not been especially critical of the government or its opponents.
"Lasantha's attack, you can speculate that it came from the government side, because he was very critical of the government," he said.
"But Mr Tennakoon ran his paper in a very impartial way. We are neither pro-government or pro-opposition."
Whoever was responsible, the attack will only exacerbate the climate of fear that pervades Sri Lanka's once vibrant media industry, with many top journalists already in hiding or sheltering overseas.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has asked foreign diplomats in Colombo to "weigh in forcefully and immediately" with President Mahinda Rajapaksa to put an end to such attacks.
But diplomats in Colombo say they have little influence over the President and his powerful brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who is the Defence Secretary.
Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights group, wrote an open letter to President Rajapaksa today asking him to drop all charges against journalists held on politically motivated charges.
J.S. Tissainayagam, a journalist, and N. Jashiharan, a publisher, and his wife, V. Valamathy, have been in detention since March 2008, it said.
The letter identified serious violations of due process and the right to a fair trial by the authorities.
"Tissainayagam's arrest was politically motivated and his detention has involved a litany of due process violations," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
"The prosecution of journalists only reinforces the impression that the government has embarked on a systematic campaign to smother free media."
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