Deathtrap Iraq

NEW YORK Reuters on Monday asked the U.S. military to conduct a full and objective investigation into the killing last week of two of its staff in Iraq after evidence emerged casting doubt on explanations given for their deaths. Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in Baghdad on Thursday in what witnesses said was a U.S. helicopter attack and which police in...

The US army and the Iraqi police have been urged to investigate the deaths of a photographer and a driver employed by Reuters Thursday in Baghdad because of the contradictory accounts about the circumstances. Their deaths bring to six the number of Reuters employees killed since the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003. Relatives of Saeed Chmagh, an Iraqi driver working with Reuters, mourn...

An interpreter and reporter in the Baghdad bureau of the New York Times was shot and killed Friday, the bureau chief, John F Burns, reported. Khalid W Hassan, 23, was the second Iraqi employee of the Times to be killed during the current conflict. Hassan was shot in the Seiydia district of south central Baghdad while driving to work under circumstances that remain unclear, Burns said. He had...

An Iraqi photographer and driver working for Reuters in Iraq have been killed in Baghdad, the agency has said. Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in eastern Baghdad Thursday at a time when clashes had been taking place between US forces and militants in the area. Noor-Eldeen was single. Chmagh was married and had four children. Four other Reuters staff —...

Baghdad, Jul 7, (VOI)- The Iraqi Society for Defending Journalists' Rights said on Saturday an Iraqi journalist was killed in the clashes that erupted between security forces and fighters of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army in the southern Iraqi city of Samawa during the last two days. "The society's office in Samawa was informed of the death of journalist Ali Watan who was working...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the murders of two Baghdad TV journalists after being kidnapped in separate incidents in the past month. Owned by the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party, Baghdad TV was the target of an armed attack just three months ago that killed two of its employees. “We are again deeply shocked by the news of these repeated attacks on the news media,” the press freedom...

The US military accused the international media on Saturday of exacerbating Iraq's violent tensions by reporting false claims of massacres which it said were deliberately fabricated by extremist groups. This week several newspapers and agencies reported that Iraqi police had found 20 beheaded corpses in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. AFP did not carry the report after its sources were unable to...

Three more Iraqi journalists have been killed in the past two weeks, delayed reports have said. They bring the number of media workers killed in Iraq since the start of the year to 36, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). One of the many victims of a bombing in Al-Khalis (55 km north of Baghdad) on June 11 was Aref Ali Falih, 32, who had been the correspondent of the independent news...

The body of an Iraqi newspaper editor kidnapped last week was found Sunday in Baghdad, police said. Gunmen ambushed Flayeh Wadi Mijthab, editor of the state-owned Al-Sabah newspaper, last Wednesday in eastern Baghdad as he was heading to work. His 25-year-old son and driver were left behind, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Mijthab's body was discovered Sunday near the Firdaws mosque in the al...

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group has claimed responsibility for the killing of an Iraqi journalist who it said "distorted the reputation of the mujahideen". Sahar al-Haideri, a mother of three, worked for the independent Aswat al-Iraq news agency in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where gunmen killed her on Thursday. "When she arrived at the area of the ambush the brothers rained her...