What is the point of this article?

Why not run an article about how many, say, shopkeepers and hairdressers or dressmakers have been killed?

One of those lawyers was murdered by her boyfriend, another was murdered by a man who decided he was seeing his estranged wife when he was merely her lawyer in the separation proceedings, and yesterday’s murder looks like it may have been connected to business dealings and not professional practice.

The fact that all three murder victims were lawyers is quite beside the point. To justify sorting them by their profession they need to have been killed because of the exercise of that profession.

When journalists are murdered by their husbands or lovers, or because they got involved in business deals that were the wrong side of shady, their journalism has nothing to do with it and their deaths do not make it into the numbers collated by freedom-of-expression NGOs around the world. To do that, their murder would have to be linked to what they have written or to stories they are investigating.