Bad day for journalists
No, make that terrible.
Two German journalists were killed in Afghanistan.
The two were traveling through the northern province of Baghlan, about 100 miles northwest of Kabul, and had stopped outside a small village, where they set up a tent to spend the night, said Mohammad Azim Hashami, the provincial police chief.
“The sound of the shooting was heard by some of the villagers, who ran toward that area,” Hashami said. “They found a tent and they found the two journalists dead.”
Hashami said nothing was stolen from the journalists, including their vehicle.
It was an execution just because somebody, or some group, wanted journalists dead.
Deutsche Welle said the journalists had been conducting private research for a documentary and were en route to the province of Bamiyan, the site of two large Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in early 2001.
Deutsche Welle director Erik Bettermann called them “pioneers in re-establishing a functioning media system in Afghanistan” and said Struwe helped set up a state-run radio and television newsroom, a project supported by Deutsche Welle.
“It is tragic that Karen Fischer and Christian Struwe had to die in the country that they spent so much of their energy supporting in the past few years,” Bettermann said.
Tragically, another murder of a journalist happened on the same day in another country.
A Russian journalist known for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya was shot to death Saturday in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, in a killing prosecutors believe could be connected to her investigative work.
Anna Politkovskaya was a tireless reporter who had written a critical book on Russian President Vladimir Putin and his campaign in Chechnya, documenting widespread abuse of civilians by government troops…
Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said…Whenever the question arose whether there is honest journalism in Russia, almost every time the first name that came to mind was Politkovskaya…”
This reminds me of the murder 10 years ago of Irish journalist Veronica Guerin, for exposing the drug underworld. And there have been many more in between then and now.
Which is a reminder that when we turn on the news or pick up a paper expecting to learn what’s going on, there are some courageous journalists out there risking their lives to find the truth and speak it freely.
