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US accused of war crimes against journos
03/05/2003 22:49 - (SA)
Paris - US attacks on a Baghdad hotel housing foreign journalists and on the office of an Arab television station were war crimes, the head of the international journalists' watchdog group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) charged on Saturday.
"Seeing an American tank firing at the Palestine Hotel and Americans hitting Al-Jazeera television, we're no longer talking professional risks. These are war crimes," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard.
Two journalists were killed by a tank round fired into an upper floor of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel where foreign correspondents were based, and an Al-Jazeera correspondent was killed in a separate missile attack on the Arabic news network's offices in downtown Baghdad.
The US troops claimed the fired on the hotel after being targeted by Iraqi gunmen who had taken refuge in the hotel. This has been denied by journalists present at the scene.
The US-led war was "relatively more deadly for the journalists than for the troops in the Anglo-American force," Menard told AFP.
He said the Americans had violated the Geneva conventions, under which journalists count as civilians in wartime and cannot become targets.
"We're not trying to equate the USA, a great democracy, with Saddam Hussein's regime which executed 500 journalists and intellectuals between 1979 et 2003," he said.
According to RSF figures published on Saturday, 13th World Press Freedom Day, the Iraq war claimed nine foreign journalists' lives as well as that of an Iraqi BBC employee.
Another four journalists died from natural causes or through accidents during the conflict.
In addition, 10 journalists - eight foreigners and two Iraqis - were wounded during hostilities.
Two others, France's Fred Nerac and Jordanian Hussein Othman, have been missing since March 22 in the Basra area.
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