 Journalists Come Under Deadly U.S. Fire At Baghdad Hotel By CRAIG NELSON Cox News Service BAGHDAD, Iraq -- For nearly three weeks, the 300 or so foreign reporters covering the war from the Palestine Hotel have operated with fear in the backs of their minds that a so-called "smart" bomb or missile might inadvertently slam into their temporary residence. It occurred to no one but the most jaded of the press corps that the hotel in central Baghdad would be deliberately targeted by U.S. forces. So, Anne Garrels of National Public Radio thought nothing of it when the walls and windows of her 11th floor room in the Palestine rattled at 11:45 a.m. "It shook like all the other times that bombs and missiles struck around Baghdad," Garrels said. It wasn't until she looked out her window and saw people fleeing from the hotel that she knew something out of the ordinary had happened. The shell from a U.S. tank had glanced off the building's 15th floor, turning concrete and metal into projectiles that killed two reporters and wounded two others in Room 1502. From the room's balcony, they had been watching a firefight between U.S. and Iraqi forces more than a mile away. The dead journalists were Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian national based in Warsaw, and Jose Couso, a cameraman for Madrid's Telecinco television. One of the wounded, Samia Nakhoul, the Lebanese-born Gulf bureau chief for Reuters, was in critical condition late Tuesday. She could not be transferred out of a country under siege and was undergoing emergency surgery. The second, an Iraqi photographer for the London-based news agency, Faleh Kheiber, was treated for facial injuries at Ibn al-Nafis hospital and released. The wounded were carried out of the hotel on bloody sheets, loaded into vehicles and rushed to the nearby hospital. Most reporters immediately assumed that an Iraqi irregular, angered by Iraqi setbacks in the war and knowing the hotel housed foreign journalists, had taken a potshot at the building with a shoulder-launched RPG, or rocket-propelled grenade. However, a television camera had recorded the turn of a U.S. tank's turret directly at the hotel and the blast from its muzzle. Word quickly spread. At an early briefing at Central Command headquarters in Qatar, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks initially said the hotel was targeted after soldiers were fired on from the lobby. Later, he told reporters, "I may have misspoken." U.S. military officials in Iraq and at the Pentagon later said that a tank from the 3rd Infantry Division had fired on the hotel after reporting that "significant" enemy fire -- including a rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire -- had come from a position in front of the 18-story hotel, along the Tigris River. U.S. Army Col. David Perkins, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, which deployed the tank, said the crew aimed at the Palestine Hotel after seeing enemy "binoculars." Dozens of lenses of TV and still cameras were trained on the battle from the hotel. At the hotel, reporters who knew the victims and those who didn't broke into tears of both disbelief and anger. The Pentagon has long known that journalists are stationed at the Palestine Hotel and has warned of the dangers of remaining in Iraq. Even if a threat was coming from the hotel, a rocket-propelled grenade has a range of about 1,000 feet; a high-powered rifle, 2,000-2,500 feet. The five M1-A1 Abrams tanks arrayed on and around central Baghdad's Jumhuriya Bridge were more than a mile-and-a-quarter away at the time of the attack. Lorenzo Cremonesi, a correspondent for the Milan newspaper Corriere Della Serra, was on the 15th floor only minutes before the attack. He and others around the hotel said they heard no small arms fire, let alone the tell-tale sound of an RPG. "I thought the Iraqis were responsible. Americans would never to do that -- or so I believed," Cremonesi said. "The crew member who fired the shot should be court-martialed. He's a war criminal." In yet another fatal attack on a journalist in Baghdad, a correspondent for the Qatar-based al-Jazeera network, Tareq Ayyoub, was killed early Tuesday when the network's Baghdad offices, situated a quarter-mile from several Iraqi anti-aircraft emplacements, were bombed. The State Department later issued a statement calling the attack "a terrible mistake." Ayyoub, a well-known Jordanian journalist, was preparing for a live broadcast when the bombing occurred, said Salem al-Amir, his colleague at al-Jazeera. The house was nearly in the heart of the battlefield as it developed. Al-Amir said the network had informed U.S. forces three weeks ago about their precise location. Ayyoub's death brought to nine the number of journalists killed since the war began March 21. The colleagues of the three journalists killed found themselves suddenly performing two roles -- reporting on tragedy, as they do regularly in their jobs, and dealing with personal loss. Suddenly, they were looking over notebooks and through lenses at friends. At the Al Kindi Hospital in northern Baghdad, al-Amir had a small digital recorder to video the morgue where the remains of his friend Ayyoub had been taken. When a hospital worker opened the morgue's walk-in refrigerator, Ayyoub's body was there with others, still wearing the bullet-proof vest that hadn't saved him. To other reporters, Amir dispensed facts about Ayyoub in broken English until he was asked how long he had known his colleague. Then he broke into tears. "Tareq my friend," he said, stepping out of the morgue. Seamus Conlan, a photographer for World Picture News on assignment in Baghdad for "People" magazine, said he was fired on by American troops when he was taking pictures at dawn from the Palestine's roof. Conlan said he first saw a tracer bullet soar over his head and immediately heard the whistling of several other bullets close by. He scrambled behind a wall for cover. Later, Conlan went upstairs to the bloody 15th-floor balcony where the attack occurred. Along the way, he found many distraught friends of the victims. "You don't like to see your colleagues crying," Conlan said. "I don't know how many people you know personally who have been killed in this work, but I've known a lot and you tend to remember them all. It's a bit of a mass mourning." (Correspondent Larry Kaplow in Baghdad contributed to this report.) |
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