Embedded US reporter killed in accident
Kelly, the first US journalist to die in the war and the first fatality among 600 journalists embedded with coalition forces, was reporting with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division when the accident happened, the paper said.
Kelly was a conservative columnist known for withering criticisms of former president Bill Clinton and his vice president Al Gore, and also worked for the New Republic and Atlantic Monthly magazines.
He was quoted in the New York Times earlier this week praising the military for allowing journalists to join combat units. “There was a real sense after the last Gulf War that witness had been lost,” he said.
“The people in the military care about that history a great deal, because it is their history. I think that it was the primal motivating impulse here, and they decided to take a gamble.”
His final column was published by the Post on Thursday.
Kelly is the fifth journalist to die during the conflict, and two others are missing. Kaveh Golestan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer from Iran, died when he stepped on a landmine in Kifri, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, on Wednesday.
Australian cameraman Paul Moran, on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was killed last month by a suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi town of Khurmal, also under Kurdish control.
Two reporters for ITN have died, while two others are missing. Gaby Rado, 48, fell from the roof of ahotel in Sulaymaniya, a major town in a Kurdish-controlled area. The circumstances of his death are not known.
ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd is believed to have been killed by US coalition fire near the southern Iraqi city of Basra at the start of the war. His Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman and French cameraman Fred Nerac are still missing.
Nerac’s wife Fabienne yesterday met French President Jacques Chirac Friday to enlist his help in finding out what had happened to her husband.
She had told Chirac that evidence provided by ITN suggested that US bullets had been fired at the vehicles.
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