Arab reporters walking out of Powell’s press conference in protest

Additional Reporting By Aws Al-Sharqy, IOL Correspondent

BAGHDAD, March 19 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Arab reporters in Baghdad reacted Friday, March 19, with fury to the killing of two Iraqi journalists by the U.S. military a day earlier.

The journalists walked out of a conference given by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Baghdad Friday in protest at shooting the two journalists working for the Arab satellite channel Al-Arabiya.

A representative of the Iraqi media read out a statement at the start of the news conference, slamming the attack.

Powell and U.S. civil administrator Paul Bremer listened quietly to the statement, and the visiting top diplomat expressed his regret for the deaths.

The journalists then stood up and walked out of the news conference.

Al-Arabiya cameraman Ali Abdul Aziz and journalist Ali al-Khatib, both Iraqis, were shot during an incident near the Burj al-Hayat hotel in central Baghdad, which was targeted by a rocket attack Thursday night.

Abdul Aziz was killed in the incident and Khatib died of his wounds Friday.

Confirmed

Powell told reporters the situation is unclear and he has no information over the shooting, much to the consternation of correspondents in Iraq.

A U.S. Army spokesman confirmed that "one Iraqi was shot and killed while trying to run a checkpoint near the Burj al-Hayat hotel" in central Baghdad at 22:16 pm (1916 GMT) Thursday.

The men's deaths would be the second and third of journalists killed at the hands of the U.S. military since May 1 when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major offensive on Iraq.

A foreign journalist seriously wounded after a U.S. tank earlier fired at a hotel filled with journalists (File photo)

On April 8, U.S. missiles hit the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, killing and wounding two staff in what the Qatar-based Arabic news network said was a deliberate strike.

Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya came under fire from U.S. officials accusing the two news casters of being biased. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said both channels, saying “they are hurting us”.

“Occupation forces want to prevent these channels from spewing out details of their criminal scandals here,” Abdullah Al-Lami, the Iraqi Press Syndicate chairman, said after the shooting.

Lami said that all steps would be taken to take the perpetrators s into justice, warning the shooting of the two journalists would not be the last.

“This is an evidence how occupation authorities are fearing media outlets, which have exposed their aggressions and the falseness of their pretexts,” said Dr. Abdel-Sattar Jawad, a mass information professor.

“There is no democracy, no press freedom, but rather more killings and mass scenes of destruction one year after the invasion,” Jawad lamented.

For journalists, killing two colleagues was rather meant as a warning signal to those covering a chaotic situation under occupation widely seen as unjustified.

“They want to frighten reporters here and stop shedding light on their indiscriminate crimes against civilians,” said correspondent Ahmed Al-Askari.

According to a report published by the International Press Institute (IPI) Wednesday, March 10, 64 journalists were killed across the world in 2003, 19 of them were in Iraq.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said this number is nearly twice the total of the previous year due largely to deaths in the war in Iraq.

Of the journalists who died in Iraq, at least four were killed by U.S. fire, most notably in the April 8 shelling of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel and the air strike that hit the Baghdad bureau of the Qatar-based channel Al-Jazeera the same day.

On August 18, U.S. troops shot dead an award-winning Reuters cameraman while he was filming on Sunday, August 17, near a U.S.-run prison in Baghdad.