Deathtrap Iraq

US soldiers who killed a Reuters journalist in Iraq acted within military rules, but the Army's probe of the incident was tainted by its failure to preserve evidence, a Pentagon investigation said on Monday. The Defense Department's inspector general, the Pentagon's watchdog agency, found that U.S. soldiers who fired on a Reuters car in west Baghdad in August 2005, killing Reuters Television...

A cameraman employed by public television station Al-Iraqiya, was seriously injured Tuesday in the bombing of a musical instruments shop in the old part of Basra, 550 km south of Baghdad, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Odai Sabri was rushed unconscious, with multiple injuries to head and body, to a hospital where he underwent an operation to remove some of the bomb fragments....

An Iraqi television station accused US troops Thursday of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home. The body of a second journalist, Haidar Hashim al-Husseini, a reporter for Al-Sharq newspaper, was found dumped in a field with nine other corpses in Diyala province, police and colleagues said. A spokeswoman for the Afaq television channel, according to a Reuters report...

Two Iraqi journalists were killed in separate incidents this week. Wisam Ali Ouda, a cameraman for the Afaq television station, was shot as he walked home in the Obaidi district of Baghdad on Wednesday morning, Reuters reported. The station’s public relations head Bushra Abdul-Amir told Reuters that witnesses said Ouda was shot by an “American sniper.” Station secretary Ghufran al-Bakri told the...

Two Iraqi journalists were killed in separate incidents this week. Wisam Ali Ouda, a cameraman for the Afaq television station, was shot as he walked home in the Obaidi district of Baghdad on Wednesday morning, Reuters reported. The station's public relations head, Bushra Abdul-Amir, told Reuters that witnesses said Ouda was shot by an "American sniper." Station secretary Ghufran al-Bakri told the...

In the long-standing battle for journalistic freedom, the victor is the Bush Administration and its embedded media program in Iraq. Journalists embedded with American troops emphasised military successes more often than they covered the invasion’s consequences for Iraqi citizens. These findings are from a study by sociologist Andrew M Lindner, writing in the spring issue of the American

The US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp is the worst prison ever, Sudanese al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj who was released from the prison days ago said Monday, according to a Xinhua report. In a speech broadcast live on Sudanese television, ai-Haj, who returned to Sudan on Friday, said he spent 2,340 days in the "most heinous prison mankind has ever known," and that jailers there insulted...

Gunmen dragged a woman freelance journalist from a taxi in Iraq's northern restive city of Mosul on Sunday and killed her in broad daylight, a local police officer told Agence France-Presse (AFP). Tharwat Abdul-Wahab, 30, was on her way to work when a group of gunmen pulled her out of the vehicle and shot her in the head in eastern Mosul's Al-Baqar neighbourhood, the policeman said on condition of...

Assailants on Friday gunned down an Iraqi journalist who had been working for a local radio station run by a Shiite political party that is the chief rival of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the station and police said, according to the Associated Press (AP). Jassim al-Batat, 38, was killed by gunmen in a speeding car as he left his house in the town of Qurna in his own car, said Adnan al...

The US military released Associated Press (AP) photographer Bilal Hussein on Wednesday after holding him for more than two years without filing formal charges. Hussein, 36, was handed over to AP colleagues at a checkpoint in Baghdad. He was taken to the site aboard a prisoner bus and left US custody wearing a traditional Iraqi robe. He was smiling and appeared in good health. "I want to thank all...