Last August, 2003, while a Reuters journalist called Mazen Dana was filming outside the US torture prison Abu Ghraib, a US tank fired on hin, killing him instantly. His last images are of the tank bearing down on him. He had previously obtained permits to film at that location. His brother claims that in a phone call a few days before he was killed, he claimed to be working on a story about secret US mass graves for mercenaries. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about this.
Journalists who were with a Reuters news cameraman shot dead by US troops while filming outside a Baghdad prison yesterday accused the soldiers of behaving in a “crazy” and negligent fashion.
They claimed the Americans had spotted the Reuters crew outside the jail half an hour before Mazen Dana was killed and must have realised he was not a guerrilla carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher … Stephan Breitner, of France 2 television, added: “We were all there for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists. After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don’t think it was an accident. They are very tense. They are crazy.”
Mazen Dana won the International Press Freedom Award in 2001 for his coverage of Israeli military actions within Hebron.
In May 2000, Dana was shot in the leg with a rubber-coated bullet while filming Palestinian youths throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Two months later, Jewish settlers beat him unconscious while he tried to film a conflict. The next day, an Israeli police officer slammed Dana’s head in the rear door of an ambulance while he was filming the evacuation of a Palestinian youth wounded in clashes. Dana was shot again last October, in the same leg, two days in a row.
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