Percival Mabasa, a Philippine journalist known for criticising President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, has been gunned down.

On Monday evening, in front of his Las Pinas home, Mr Mabasa was shot at point blank range by two assailants on a motorcycle. He was in his car when the attackers started shooting at him and drove off.

Mr Mabasa, a fierce critic of the Marcos administration, had used his radio show to berate both the incumbent president and his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte.

According to the New York Times, Mr Mabasa rebuked the violent anti-drug campaign of ex-president Duterte and mocked efforts by backers of the Marcos family to pass off the current president’s father, who ruled the Philippines as a dictator from 1965 to 1986, as a victim of his political foes.

Mr Mabasa had also accused the president of lacking transparency, after discovering irregularities in the administration’s importation of sugar through a state agency.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, which condemned his death, asserted that Mr Mabasa was the second journalist to have been killed since Mr Marcos took power in June. 

Renato ‘Rey’ Blanco, a former colleague of Mr Mabasa, who worked at the same radio station, had been stabbed to death in September.