GLOBAL: Award-winning photojournalists killed in Libya

MISRATA, Libya: Oscar-nominated director and photojournalist Tim Hetherington and war photographer Chris Hondros both died after a mortar strike in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata overnight.

 

Vanity Fair, for which Hetherington was working, confirmed the death of the 41-year-old Briton who covered numerous conflicts and won the 2007 World Press Photo Award for his coverage of US soldiers in Afghanistan.

 

The Getty Images photo agency said Hondros, an American who was working for the agency, died later from injuries sustained in the same attack.

 

Doctors in Misrata said two other photojournalists had been wounded.

 

Three journalists have now been killed while covering the two-month-old Libyan conflict.

 

As well as his photography work, Hetherington also co-directed and produced the documentary Restrepo, which won two Oscar nominations.

 

The film followed the fortunes of a US platoon involved in fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

 

"He really wanted to get the pictures but at the same time I had the impression he was a very responsible person," Tiziana Prezzo, an Italian journalist who was in Misrata two days earlier, said.

 

"He was one of the last people I met in Misrata. Now that he's not alive anymore ... it's shocking," she said.

 

Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer Hondros had covered many of the world's conflict zones over the last decade, working in Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, and Liberia, among other places.

 

In 2006 he won the Robert Capa Gold Medal photography award for his "exceptional courage and enterprise" in Iraq.

 

The four journalists were hit by mortar fire on Tripoli Street, the main thoroughfare and focus of fighting in Misrata, which has been under siege for almost two months by Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi's forces.

 

In the courtroom of Benghazi, the seat of the opposition, photographs of missing journalists plaster the walls alongside a portrait of Ali Hassan al-Jaber, an Al-Jazeera cameraman killed on March 12 in an ambush near Benghazi.

 

Jaber was the first foreign journalist killed in Libya since the beginning of the uprising against Gaddafi on February 15. Numerous journalists have been detained and often mistreated by the Libyan regime.

 

A spokesman for the rebel Transitional National Council (TNC) said eight foreign journalists and six Libyan colleagues are currently being held by Gaddafi's forces.

 

TNC spokesman Abdel Hafiz Ghoqa said journalists were free to work unhindered in rebel-held areas of eastern Libya.

 

"Even under the difficult conditions imposed to us by the regime, everyone is free to say what they think and move where they wish, journalists and citizens alike," he said.

 

A growing number of media companies are hiring security consultants for advice on their movements around the fluctuating frontline between Gaddafi's loyalists and rebel forces. - Agence France-Presse/ABC/Pacific Media Watch