(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has expressed outrage at the United States (U.S.) bombing of the Baghdad office of the pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera on 8 April 2003. One Al-Jazeera journalist, cameraman Tarek Ayoub, died in the attack and another was wounded. The nearby premises of Abu Dhabi television were also damaged. “We strongly condemn this attack […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has expressed outrage at the United States (U.S.) bombing of the Baghdad office of the pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera on 8 April 2003. One Al-Jazeera journalist, cameraman Tarek Ayoub, died in the attack and another was wounded. The nearby premises of Abu Dhabi television were also damaged.
“We strongly condemn this attack on a neighbourhood known to include the offices of several TV stations,” said RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard in a letter to General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. military operations in Iraq. “To ensure the safety of its journalists, Al-Jazeera’s management has been careful to inform the Americans of the exact location of its crews right from the start of the war. The U.S. army cannot therefore claim it did not know where the Baghdad offices were. Did it at least warn the journalists about an imminent bombing? The outcome was predictable. Yet another journalist was killed covering this very deadly war for the media,” Ménard said. He called on Franks to undertake a serious and thorough investigation of the attack in order to establish who was responsible for it and why it was carried out.
An Al-Jazeera journalist who was in Baghdad until a few days ago told RSF, “It could not have been a mistake. We’ve told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying ‘TV’.”
Ayoub, a Jordanian national who was the station’s permanent correspondent in Amman, was sent to beef up the Al-Jazeera team in Iraq when the war broke out. He was seriously wounded in the 8 April attack and died soon afterwards.
The Al-Jazeera offices are located in an apartment block between the Mansour Hotel and the Planning Ministry, in a central Baghdad area where there are many government offices. Another Al-Jazeera journalist, Zohair al-Iraqi, an Iraqi citizen, suffered a neck wound in the attack.
One of Al-Jazeera’s vehicles, which was clearly marked, came under fire from U.S. forces on a highway near Baghdad on 7 April. The station said its office in Basra was directly shelled on 2 April.
Four members of the Al-Jazeera crew in Basra, the only journalists inside the city, came under gunfire from British tanks on 29 March as they were filming the distribution of food by Iraqi government officials (see IFEX alert of 31 March 2003). One of the station’s cameramen, Akil Abdel Reda, went missing and was later found to have been held for 12 hours by U.S. troops.
The Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul were bombed by U.S. forces during the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November 2001 (see alerts of 1 February 2002, 15 and 14 November 2001). At the time, RSF asked U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for an explanation but did not receive an answer.
On the 20th day of the war, the media toll is seven journalists and a media assistant killed while covering the conflict. At least five journalists have been wounded and two, Frédéric Nerac and Hussein Osman, both from the British television network ITN – are still missing.
Those killed were: Paul Moran (ABC, Australia), Terry Lloyd (ITN), Kaveh Golestan (BBC), Michael Kelly (“Washington Post”), Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed (BBC), Christian Liebig (“Focus”), Julio Anguita Parrado (“El Mundo”) and Tarek Ayoub (Al-Jazeera).
On its website, www.rsf.org, RSF is keeping a tally of the number of journalists killed, wounded and missing while doing their job in a war that is proving very hard for the media to cover.
