Yesterday, US soldiers shelled the two floors of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad where journalists were staying. They say they fired because there was a sniper shooting at them from the hotel. Journalists say that is a lot of crap, because they heard no shots AND their recordings prior to the hit (that show no such sounds) prove it.
On the other side of town, Al-Jazeera office was bombed by a plane, killing one journalist. Al-Jazeera thinks this was deliberate. If you recall, their office in Afghanistan was also bombed by "mistake" during the war.
Here's an article on yesterday's field day on non-embedded journalists:
guardian.co.uk
Three Journalists Die in Baghdad Attacks
Tuesday April 8, 2003 7:30 PM
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. tank shell hit a hotel where hundreds of journalists were staying and a U.S. bomb landed on the office of an Arab television network in the Iraqi capital on Tuesday, killing a total of three journalists and wounding three others.
A statement from U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar, said U.S. forces fired on the Palestine Hotel after troops received ``significant'' enemy fire from the 18-story hotel just off Firdos Square along the Tigris River.
But journalists who were standing on balconies of the hotel taking pictures said they witnessed no signs of firing from the hotel before seeing the tank open fire from a bridge a little over half a mile away.
The tank shell hit balconies on the 14th and 15th floors of the hotel, spraying glass and shrapnel into a corner suite used by the Reuters news agency.
A Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, 35, was killed and three other Reuters employees were wounded. Spanish television network Telecinco said its cameraman, Jose Couso, 37, hit in the leg and jaw, also died after surgery.
The tank that fired was attached to the 3rd Infantry Division.
U.S. Army Col. David Perkins, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, told an Associated Press reporter assigned to the unit that Iraqis fired rocket-propelled grenades at tanks from in front of the Palestine Hotel, and the military, scanning the area for observation posts, saw binoculars and fired. The tanks were also taking fire from mortars, he said.
``There must have been 50 cameras on the balconies,'' said AP photographer Jerome Delay, who was on top floor. ``How can they spot someone with binoculars and not cameras?''
Delay said that he watched the tanks which had taken up positions on the bridge from his vantage point on the top floor of the hotel. ``All the shooting was concentrated on the bridge and across the river,'' where U.S. forces were located, he said.
Delay said he had seen numerous fighters, some dressed in black, near the bridge the night before.
The hotel has been the site of news conferences with Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who has acted as the spokesman for Saddam Hussein's regime. Al-Sahhaf, appearing outside the Palestine Hotel after the shelling, said coalition forces were targeting civilian areas.
Across the river to the west, Tareq Ayyoub, a Jordanian correspondent for the Arab television network al-Jazeera, was killed earlier Tuesday when a U.S. bomb landed on the network's Baghdad office. An Abu Dhabi TV office in the same area was damaged by a round, knocking down a camera, but no one was injured.
In all, 10 employees of news organizations have been killed in combat situations in Iraq since the war began March 20.
Central Command said the al-Jazeera office was hit after U.S. forces ``came under significant enemy fire from the building where the al-Jazeera journalists were working.''
Asked about damage to the al-Jazeera office, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said, ``This coalition does not target journalists.''
Nabil Khoury, a U.S. State Department spokesman in Doha, Qatar, said the strike was ``a grave mistake.''
However, al-Jazeera chief editor Ibrahim Hilal said the U.S. military knew exactly where the network's offices were, including the building's map coordinates and street number.
At the Palestine Hotel, frightened reporters in flak vests carried wounded colleagues on blankets to cars waiting to take them to the hospital.
Foreign reporters and camera crews have been covering the war from balconies and rooftops of the hotel. Reporters said the two tanks had deployed that morning on the river's al-Jumhuriya bridge, near the ``old palace'' presidential compound.
Faleh Kheibar, a photographer for Reuters, said he was trying to take a picture of a U.S. helicopter hovering over Baghdad when the shell hit the 15th-floor suite.
``I changed my place just seconds before the blast,'' he said. He was wounded by shrapnel on his forehead and left cheek. Inside the suite, blood and damaged equipment was strewn on the floors.
``Clearly the war, and all its confusion, has come to the heart of Baghdad,'' said Reuters Editor in Chief Geert Linnebank. ``But the incident nonetheless raises questions about the judgment of the advancing U.S. troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad.''
Speaking at Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, Brooks told reporters initially that the U.S. forces had been fired on from the hotel lobby. But he later corrected his remarks to say ``I may have misspoken on exactly where the fire came from.''
Perkins said the military regretted what happened and was ordering troops not to fire on the hotel, but he placed the blame squarely on Saddam Hussein.
``By militarizing these areas, Saddam is putting these people at risk,'' Perkins said. ``The soldier's primary responsibility is to protect himself and his crew.''
Al-Jazeera's two-story office is located on a road along the Tigris River that links the Information Ministry with the old palace presidential compound.
Al-Jazeera, an independent Arabic-language network, showed footage of people carrying Ayyoub to a jeep, then rushing him to the hospital, where he died. It described him as a ``martyr of duty.'' The network also showed a cameraman with his chest covered in blood but said his injuries were not life-threatening.
Also Tuesday, one of two Polish reporters missing in Iraq after being stopped by armed men at a checkpoint called his wife to tell her he and his colleague had escaped.
On Monday, two journalists were killed in an Iraqi rocket attack on the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division south of Baghdad. Spaniard Julio Anguita Parrado, 32, was reporting for the newspaper El Mundo, and Christian Liebig, 35, was covering the war for the German news weekly Focus. Liebig was a former editor on the international news desk of AP's German language service. |
