British reporter embedded with US troops killed

AN explosion in southern Afghanistan killed a British journalist, a US Marine and an Afghan soldier, Britain’s military said yesterday.

The Sunday Mirror’s defence correspondent Rupert Hamer, 39, and photographer Philip Coburn, 43, were accompanying a US Marine patrol on Saturday when the vehicle they were travelling in was hit by a makeshift bomb near the village of Nawa in Helmand, the Defence Ministry said.

Coburn and four marines were seriously wounded in the blast, the military said. British media said that Hamer was the first British journalist to have been killed in Afghanistan.