Sardasht Osman, a final-year English student at Salaheddin University in Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, was found dead overnight in the restive northern city of Mosul officials said.

He had been kidnapped on Tuesday on his university campus in Arbil.

"I received a phone call saying a citizen had been kidnapped in Arbil and we informed police," said Marwan Abdulhamid, an official with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the region's two dominant political parties.

"Mosul police informed us at around midnight that they found a corpse with a university ID."

Osman, 22, worked as a journalist for the magazine Ashtiname ("Letter for Peace" in Kurdish) and as an English-Kurdish translator.

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said he also wrote articles for a variety of other Kurdish publications.

"Osman's murder again highlights the extreme danger to which independent journalists are exposed in Iraqi Kurdistan," it said in a statement.

"We call on the authorities to shed light on his death. Those responsible must be arrested and tried. We also urge the government of Kurdistan to accept the gravity of the situation and to ensure that journalists are protected."

In its Press Freedom 2009 index published in October, Reporters Without Borders ranked Iraq at a lowly 145th place for media freedom out of 175 countries.

And according to the Committee to Protect Journalist's 2010 "Impunity Index" published last month, Iraq has the worst record of any country in the world when it comes to solving murders of reporters.

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