12/20/06

Murder leading cause of journalists killed in Iraq in 2006

By RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- With murder the leading cause, at least 32 journalists have been killed in Iraq in 2006, the highest one-year toll ever in a single country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a report Wednesday.

The Middle East nation, torn by war and bloody sectarian violence, was the world's most dangerous country for the news media for the fourth straight year, according to CPJ, a New York-based advocacy group. The committee said its latest yearly count brings to 93 the total killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003, with another 37 drivers, messengers and other press "support staff" also slain.

Of the 32 reported media casualties to date this year in Iraq, 26 were murdered, the CPJ report said.

The most recent was Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah, 35, an Associated Press Television News cameraman. He was shot dead by insurgents who saw him taping their firefight with police in the northern Iraq city of Mosul on Dec. 12. A police official said the insurgents shot Lutfallah five times and stole his equipment.

"Journalists clearly are being targeted and murdered for doing their work," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said in Wednesday's statement. "The surge in the death toll is chilling."

In world conflicts before and including the Vietnam War, most journalist deaths were combat-related and murders extremely rare. That changed in the early 1970s, when some 34 media members were killed or went missing in Cambodia. Most were murdered; many never were found.

The trend since has been upward, and in 2006, most of the 84 news media members killed worldwide were murdered -- all of them in 16 countries, the committee said.

The group said it would issue a final report of journalist casualties for the year on Jan. 2. But its count of 32 in Iraq already exceeds the previous high of 24 each in Iraq in 2004 and Algeria in 1995.

While CPJ said its records date back only 25 years, it is clear that no conflict has taken such a toll among journalists as Iraq -- not even World War II, in which 68 were killed. The previous high was at least 71 killed in the Vietnam War, including 34 in Cambodia, between 1965 and 1975.

Unlike in Indochina, where almost all press casualties were foreigners, Iraq's are mainly local journalists working for Iraqi or international news organizations.

Of Iraq's 32 victims this year, all but two were Iraqis, and 26 were murdered by gunmen or by bomb explosions, according to CPJ. The group said four were kidnapped and killed, and 12 others had been "threatened" beforehand.

After Lutfallah's murder, CPJ urged Iraqi authorities to act against those responsible "for the growing number of deadly attacks on the press, and stop the cycle of impunity."

Long-term records show fewer than 15 percent of journalist murders are solved through arrests and prosecution, a trend that continued in 2006, the committee said.

CPJ said the deadliest attack on the press in Iraq occurred on Oct. 12, when masked gunmen executed 11 people, five of them journalists, at the new satellite TV channel Al-Shaabiya. Another noted murder victim in Iraq was Atwar Bahjat, one of the Arab world's most prominent women reporters, who CPJ said was "hunted down and shot simply for working in the news media."

Other countries it singled out as "deadly datelines" were Russia, where well-known investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in her Moscow apartment, as well as Mexico, Colombia, Afghanistan and the Philippines.