The director of a Mexican news website has been shot dead in the beach resort of Playa del Carmen, the second employee of the publication to have been killed in less than a month.

Rubén Pat, the director of the online outlet Semanario Playa News, was shot dead at around 5.48am on Tuesday outside a bar-nightclub in the city 65km south of Cancún.

In a statement posted on Facebook, Playa News appealed to Carlos Manuel Joaquín González, the governor of Quintana Roo state, which has been hard hit by violence in recent months.

“That’s two from our team, Governor, when will the lack of public safety in our state end?” the statement said.

Pat was the sixth Mexican journalist believed to have been killed for his work in 2018. As is often the case in attacks on the country’s journalists, the immediate motive was not clear.

Last year, Pat complained that municipal officers had detained and beaten him after he published a story on a banner hung by a drug cartel accusing the police of acting in cahoots with a rival cartel.

“They told me to stop publishing articles about a local police chief, and that I knew what would be coming to me if I didn’t,” Pat told the Committee to Protect Journalists .

He was the second Playa News employee to be murdered in less than a month. The Reporter José Guadalupe Chan Dzib was killed in the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto in late June.

Chan Dzib’s slaying remains unsolved – common in a country where attacks on the media remain in the realm of impunity.

Quintana Roo state includes the crown jewels of Mexico’s Caribbean tourist industry – Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Tulum – but it has turned especially violent as drug cartels dispute control of a coveted territory for smuggling and retailing. In the first six months of 2018, the state’s murder rate has soared by 132%.

Playa del Carmen was once a sleepy beach town next to the island of Cozumel, but it has been hit by explosive growth and increasing violence. A shooting at 2017 music festival in in the town left five people dead.