WELL-KNOWN CRIME REPORTER IS SHOT OUTSIDE QUEBEC NEWSPAPER

After years of listening to death threats on his answering machine,
Michel Auger learned to live the elusive life, varying routes to work,
sleeping in hotels, listing his office address as his home address.
But, deep down, Mr. Auger, a seasoned, 56-year-old reporter, always
believed he was protected by his work, printed under the best-read
byline in his city's best-read paper.

But Mr. Auger's luck ran out last Wednesday morning. As he opened his
car trunk to remove a laptop computer, a gunman approached him from
behind in the newspaper parking lot. As three surveillance cameras
filmed and a silencer muffled the shots, the assailant fired six times,
missing only once. Doctors removed five bullets from Mr. Auger's back;
he is in serious condition.

The setting was not Colombia, but Quebec. And the city was not
Marseille, but Montreal.

"All Canadians are shocked at what took place in the parking lot of Le
Journal de Montreal," Canada's justice minister, Anne McLellan, said,
referring to the attack on Mr. Auger.

Widely respected as the best-informed reporter on Montreal's
underworld, Mr. Auger was regularly interviewed by visiting Canadian
and American journalists, most notably last December when an Algerian
resident of Montreal was arrested and charged with carrying explosives
into the United States.

Wednesday's attack came the day after Le Journal de Montreal published
a two-page report by Mr. Auger, under the headline "Chaos Among the
Bosses," outlining the latest killings in a turf war between two rival
drug gangs, the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine. Over the last five
years, the drug war has spawned 153 murders, 172 murder attempts, 130
arson attacks and 85 bombings. Muting public outrage over this
violence, the Montreal police say 95 percent of the victims have been
gangsters.

On Thursday, Noella Gingras, 41, was charged with making death threats
against Mr. Auger. According to the police, Ms. Gingras left a death
threat on Mr. Auger's answering machine hours after reading an article
that mentioned her boyfriend, Francois Gagnon, who was killed in June.
Mr. Auger wrote, "Despite his 350 pounds of bulk, Gagnon was a pathetic
little crook."

Ms. Gingras is not a suspect in the attack on Mr. Auger, and the police
say they have made no arrests.

On Friday, as protesters in Quebec and Ottawa carried bilingual signs,
"Non a la intimidation - No to intimidation," advocates for the news
media noted that while physical attacks on reporters in North America
are rare, attacks by criminals on journalists are on the rise
worldwide.

"We have seen over the last decade an increase in assassinations and
assassination attempts by organized crime figures and drug lords," said
Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists,
a organization based in New York. "It is rare in the United States and
Canada, and much more commonplace in Colombia and the states of the
former Soviet Union."

Canadians often see themselves as caretakers of the kinder, gentler
corner of North America, a place where strict gun control goes hand in
hand with low crime. Now they are wrestling with issues of self-
censorship and impunity, worries that are normally the preserve of
rougher parts of the world.

"There is a danger of self-censorship," Helene Pichette, president of
the Professional Federation of Quebec Journalists, said. "If it is not
the journalists who become more cautious, maybe it will be the people
close to them who urge them to be more prudent."

As yellow police tape cordons off Mr. Auger's desk in the newsroom, a
sense of menace hangs over the normally feisty news media of Montreal,
a city with four competing dailies, three in French and one in English.
By consensus, newspapers are not publishing photos or the names of Mr.
Auger's family members, or the name of the hospital where he is
recuperating under a 24-hour police guard.

Anne-Marie Dussault, host of a television talk show, says she now
understands why Mr. Auger and many other journalists declined to appear
on her Sept. 8 show, which focused on the gang war. She told Le Journal
de Montreal: "It gives me shivers to realize that some people could be
risking their lives by going on the show."

Although Mr. Auger was able to call 911 on his cell phone as he lay
bleeding in the parking lot, he has not spoken publicly since the
shooting. In his absence, French-language television repeatedly
broadcast last week snippets from an interview he gave a few hours
before he was shot. Alluding to fear, he said: "When you cover a biker
war that has killed 150 people in Quebec, obviously you think about it,
you talk about it."

Noting that in the last years, gang members once shot a Quebec reporter
in the arm and another journalist in the legs, reporters see the Auger
shooting as a clear escalation.

The shooting has so angered Quebec politicians that the ruling Parti
Quebecois, which advocates separating Quebec from Canada, has proposed
suspending the right of association for criminal gangs, a step that
outraged separatists the last time it was taken, in 1970, to break up
violent separatist groups. Membership in certain gangs would be
outlawed for five years under the latest proposal, which has won
support in Ontario, Canada's most powerful province, and Manitoba and
Saskatchewan, two Western provinces with gang problems.

Despite fears of crimping civil liberties, some believe freedom of the
press overrides those concerns. Michel C. Auger, Le Journal de
Montreal's political columnist, who is no relation to the crime
reporter, wrote that faced with choosing "between the freedom of
association of `les Hells' and freedom of the press, a democratic
society should not need to hesitate for long."