French, US journalists killed in Syria

AFP

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

FRANCE identified two Western reporters killed in Syria today as veteran American war correspondent Marie Colvin of Britain's Sunday Times and freelance French photojournalist Remi Ochlik.

France's Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said the pair had been fleeing a bombardment in the besieged rebel city of Homs when they were killed.

"It's absolutely overwhelming, terrible," he said.

Colvin was a renowned reporter who had covered countless conflicts over 30 years and wore a distinctive eye patch after she was wounded in Sri Lanka.

She was voted Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the 2010 British Press Awards.

Ochlik was a 28-year-old photographer represented by the IP3 agency, which he co-founded in Paris, who quit his studies aged 20 to report on Haiti and has since covered many of the recent upheavals in the Arab world.

Separately, the French daily Le Figaro said one of its reporters, Edith Bouvier, had been among three journalists wounded in the same incident.

"I received two calls from Homs this morning to tell me that Edith was wounded in the legs. We're trying to organise her evacuation," foreign editor Philippe Gelie told AFP in Paris.

The bombardment of Homs continued for a 19th straight day Wednesday, activists said, while calls mounted for a truce to allow in humanitarian aid.

The latest barrage came a day after security forces killed at least 68 people across Syria, bringing the overall death toll of violence since March 2011 to 7,636 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The toll includes 5,542 civilians, 1,692 soldiers and police, and 400 rebel fighters, the head of the Britain-based rights monitoring group, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.

Activist Omar Shaker from inside Baba Amr told AFP that two Western journalists were killed and three others wounded as a shell crashed into a makeshift media centre set up by anti-regime militants.

The area remained the target of random shelling, blocking attempts to remove the bodies, the activist said.

France said one of the journalists killed was a French national, as the Syrian Observatory said the two journalists killed were an American woman and a French man.

French television reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in Homs last month as a shell exploded amid a group of journalists covering protests in the city on a visit organised by the Syrian authorities.

Despite a plea by activists to allow women and children to flee Homs's besieged Baba Amr neighbourhood, more troops were sent Tuesday to the outskirts of the restive city, monitors and activists said.