Al-Jazeera wants out

2003-04-08 22:56

Doha - Arabic-language network al-Jazeera said on Tuesday it wanted its team out of Baghdad after one of its correspondents was killed by US fire, amid what it said were fears its reporters were now targets.

The editor-in-chief of the maverick Qatar-based network, which has come under sharp criticism from the United States and Britain over its coverage of the Iraq war, asked for their help to get its reporters out of Baghdad.

An al-Jazeera journalist on air earlier in the day accused the United States of intentionally targeting the network. The channel's offices in Kabul were also hit during the 2001 US-led war in Afghanistan.

"We are calling on the US-Anglo forces to locate them and to provide assistance in getting them out," Ibrahim Hilal said at the network's headquarters in Qatar. "I believe that none of them is safe any more."

Tareq Ayub was killed on Tuesday when a US missile hit the network's offices in Baghdad. With Iraqi approval, al-Jazeera is not stationed in the same hotel as most of the foreign press.

Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman with Reuters and Jose Couso from Spanish network Telecinco, were killed at the Palestine Hotel when a US tank opened fired towards it on Tuesday.

US Central Command first said troops had come under fire from the lobby, while the field commander said whatever fire had targeted his troops was wiped out with a single tank round into the upper floors of the hotel.

But after a journalist questioned why the tank shot the upper floors when fire had come from the lobby, Central Command issued a revised statement saying there had been "significant enemy fire."

It made the same claim about the al-Jazeera incident.

Washington and London blasted al-Jazeera after the network carried footage from Iraqi television of dead coalition soldiers and prisoners of war, as well as repeated images of Iraqi civilians badly wounded in air strikes.

- AFX