TEGUCIGALPA (AFP) --  A journalist has been shot dead in

Honduras, in the 21st deadly attack on the media in the violence-wracked Central American country in the past three years, a press watchdog said Friday.

Adonis Felipe Bueso Gutierrez, 24, was leaving an Internet cafe in the northern city of Villanueva with two cousins on July 8 when he was shot, said Longino Becerra of the Committee for Freedom of Expression (C-Libre).

Bueso Gutierrez was a journalist for Radio Stereo Naranja, a Christian station. His cousins was akso killed in the incident in Villanueva, located 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the capital Tegucigalpa.

Police deemed the incident a theft gone wrong but the victim had said before his death that the violence in Villanueva was escalating, said Becerra.

Twenty-one journalists have been killed in Honduras since the overthrow of president Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. None of the murders have been solved.

"The possibility that (his death) was connected with his work cannot be ruled out," Reporter Without Borders said in a statement.

"In each of these cases that has plunged the profession of journalism into mourning, the same impunity applies, whether they are attributable to the country's high crime rate or the political violence spawned by the coup."

Honduras -- with a total population of 7.6 million -- has the highest annual homicide rate, with 86 killed for every 100,000 inhabitants in 2011, according to UN agencies.