Dhaka: The ambush of a convoy in South Sudan and killing bloggers in Bangladesh this year propelled the two nations onto CPJ’s Global Impunity Index, bringing countries in the limelight where journalists are murdered and their killers go unpunished.

A wave of violence against bloggers has landed Bangladesh back onto the index for the first time since 2011, the report said in Bangladesh section.

At least four Bangladeshi bloggers have been hacked to death by apparent Islamic extremists this year alone, and a total of five of Bangladesh’s seven victims of unsolved murders over the last decade are bloggers who criticized religious extremism, the report said.

Brazen attacks against bloggers like American-Bangladeshi Avijit Roy, who was pulled from a rickshaw by machete-wielding assailants outside a book fair in Dhaka, have been followed by a handful of arrests, but in only one case since 2005, Gautam Das, have the perpetrators been tried and convicted.

Colombia exited the index as fatal violence against journalists receded further into that country’s past.

For the first time since CPJ began compiling the index in 2008, Iraq did not claim the title of worst offender, as Somalia edged into that spot.

The shift reflects a steady death toll in Somalia, where one or more journalists have been murdered every year over the past decade, and the government has proved unable or unwilling to investigate the attacks.

Iraq’s move away from the top spot is based on a number of factors, few of them encouraging; only one conviction has been achieved in Iraq.

The Impunity Index examines unsolved murders over the previous decade in which journalism is the confirmed motive.

The first couple of years of the Iraq War are no longer covered by the most recent 10-year period, and targeted killings dropped in the second half of the decade compared with the watermark years of 2006 and 2007.

More recently, members of the militant group Islamic State have abducted and killed at least two journalists.

The group’s forceful control of information has to date made it impossible for CPJ to accurately document additional cases and determine the motive.