Links to photos of Iraqi casualties

Thursday April 10, 2003 23:20

by SANA

From the Syrian News Agency

This is what we are not seeing in the USA: innocent victims of the Empire's War. Also: CAIRO — The Arab press accused the United States yesterday of “liquidating” reporters, whom the Americans were said to view as “annoying witnesses to the carnage” committed against Iraqi civilians.

http://www.sana.org/pictures/Iraq%20photos.htm

http://www.sana.org/pictures/Iraq%20photos1.htm

http://www.sana.org/pictures/Iraq%20photos2.htm

A story from the AFP:

The day truth died

CAIRO — The Arab press accused the United States yesterday of “liquidating” reporters, whom the Americans were said to view as “annoying witnesses to the carnage” committed against Iraqi civilians.

The denunciation came a day after television reporters from Reuters and Spain’s Telecinco were killed by a tank round fired into an upper floor of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, and an Al Jazeera correspondent was killed in a separate missile attack on the Arabic news network’s offices in downtown Baghdad.

The dead were identified as Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman with Reuters, Jose Couso from Spanish network Telecinco and Al Jazeera’s Tareq Ayub.

Egyptian government weekly Al Mussawar said “the crushing and premeditated deaths of the journalists, victims of the coalition forces, is shown to be an “Operation Pull Out the Eyes” of the Arab and Western media so that they cannot witness the events Baghdad is about to experience.”

The magazine said US forces had “begun the assault on Baghdad with the slaughter of journalists.”

Al Hayat daily said “it is a war crime to fire in a premeditated fashion against journalists on the battlefield. They fired on the soldiers of truth because they did not want witnesses to their crimes.”

Government daily Al Akhbar said “whoever fired knew what his deadly shots were aimed at. It was impossible to mistake the hotel, because millions of people knew that it was swarming with hundreds of journalists,” the newspaper said.

“The invasion forces killed journalists to cover up their barbarous slaughter in Iraq.”

That view was echoed by the opposition daily Al Wafd, which said “the invaders liquidate journalists in order to impose a blackout on their butchery.

Salah Eddine Hafez, secretary-general of the Cairo-based Federation of Arab Journalists, said the “bombardment and premeditated murder of journalists signifies that the US-British invasion forces are endeavouring to prevent the media from transmitting their stories on Iraq.”

In Abu Dhabi, the Al Ittihad daily said the killings on Tuesday were aimed at “stifling the voice of truth.”

Another UAE daily, Al Khaleej, accused the “forces of aggression” of “murdering liberty, truth and human rights.”

For his part, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa called “very serious” the targeting of journalists, who he said were fulfilling a “noble mission in transmitting the truth.”

In Amman, the head of Jordan’s Press Union led an angry march to denounce the death of Al Jazeera’s Ayub, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, that his father said was an attack on press freedom.

“They are attacking journalists to hide the truth,” Naeem Ayub said, as he held up his son’s one-year-old daughter Fatima, with tears running down his face.

Around 300 people, most of them journalists, took part in the solidarity march from Jordan’s Al Dustour newspaper down Press Road to the English-language Jordan Times where Ayub also worked.

“We call on the international community to intervene immediately to stop the aggression (on Iraq) and to protect journalists because what happened is a war crime,” Press Union president Tareq Momani said in a statement.

“This is a war crime and we demand that those responsible be tried for it,” Momani said.

In Damascus, dozens of Syrian, Arab and Western journalists held a sit-in yesterday outside the Union of Syrian Journalists. — AFP

http://www.timesofoman.com/newsdetails.asp?newsid=29209