Missing Carroll was top young journalist

Ambitious, determined and talented, Rory Carroll’s intrepid journalism has taken him across Europe, Africa and, inevitably, to Iraq’s volatile capital Baghdad.

The 33-year-old, named Northern Ireland’s young journalist of the year in 1997, is renowned as a diligent and level-headed reporter and was marked out early in his career as a likely high achiever.

He has worked from Baghdad for the last nine months, leaving his post as the Guardian’s South Africa correspondent after three years based in Johannesburg.

Friend Ken Murray, a political correspondent with Independent News Network (INN) in Dublin, said Carroll is “a very friendly guy, hardworking but a very level and cool guy“.

Mr Murray, a fellow Masters degree in journalism student at Dublin City University between 1994 and 1995, said: “In other words, if he’s in a kidnap situation, he won’t do anything foolish. He’s a bright guy, he’ll keep his cool and he’ll do as he is told.”

Though many of Carroll’s classmates went on to work with national newspapers and television stations in Ireland, Carroll was seen as the star pupil.

He had originally graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and began his career as a reporter for the Irish News, in Belfast.

The journalist, who has family in Blackrock, in south Dublin, quickly won awards and followed in the footsteps of his foreign correspondent father Joe, who had been based in North America for the Irish Times.

Carroll was posted to Rome as Southern Europe correspondent for the Guardian in 1999, leaving for Africa in 2002.

In January, he wrote about an attempted mugging in Johannesburg, when he was challenged by a knife-wielding youth.

He revealed how he had given chase to his attacker and even picked up the boy’s discarded knife.

The correspondent admitted the experience had made him more cautious, but was also keen to stress the benefits of living in the troubled city.

Once in Iraq, he detailed tensions between US forces and the local population and reported on the continuing wave of violence engulfing Baghdad.

He had also written about claims American forces may have been involved in the death of 18 media workers and raised concern about the fate of local Iraqi journalists contracted by foreign organisations.

The reporter had been reporting this morning on the start of Saddam Hussein’s trial in Baghdad’s Green Zone and was interviewed on Irish radio.

It is not yet clear how he came to be seized and British colleagues in Baghdad have declined to comment for fear they may put him in further peril.