An image grab from a video uploaded on You Tube is said to show a car burning after shelling in the Baba Amro neighborhoud of Homs in Syria today. (AFP Photo/YouTube)
HOMS, Syria — Two Western journalists were killed Wednesday in the flashpoint city of Homs after Syrian security forces shelled the building where they were staying.
UK foreign secretary William Hague confirmed that the journalists were Marie Colvin from Long Island, a veteran war correspondent for The (London) Sunday Times, and French freelance photographer Remi Ochlik.
British prime minister David Cameron said the death of Colvin was a “desperately sad reminder of the risks that journalists take to inform the world of what is happening and the dreadful events in Syria.”
French president Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the deaths, saying “this shows enough is enough, the regime must go.”
The Sunday Times confirmed Colvin’s death, and said it was doing all it could to recover her body.
“I want to report with great shock the sad news of the death of Marie Colvin in Syria today [Wednesday]. We have reliable reports that Marie was killed in Homs while covering the devastating bombardment by the Syrian army,” the newspaper’s editor John Witherow said in a statement.
News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch paid tribute to Colvin, describing her in a statement as “one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation.”
“She put her life in danger on many occasions because she was driven by a determination that the misdeeds of tyrants and the suffering of the victims did not go unreported,” Murdoch said.
The reporters were killed when the building housing foreign and Syrian opposition journalists in Baba Amr district was hit, activists said.
Colvin was one of the few reporters to interview ousted Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy in his final days before his death in October. Her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, of East Norwich, told the AP that her daughter knew Khadafy well, and described her daughter as a passionate about her work, even when it got very hard.
“She was supposed to leave (Syria) today,” Rosemarie Colvin said, adding that her daughter had spoken yesterday with her editor who ordered her to leave because it was so dangerous. “She had to stay. She wanted to finish one more story.”
The eldest of five children, Colvin is survived by her mother, two sisters and two brothers. Rosemarie Colvin invited reporters into her home, fighting back the tears.
“The reason I’ve been talking to all you guys is that I don’t want my daughter’s legacy to be ‘no comment … because she wasn’t a ‘no comment’ person,'” she said. “Her legacy is: Be passionate and be involved in what you believe in. And do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can.”
Several other foreign journalists were injured, including Paul Conroy, a freelance photographer working with Colvin. French daily Le Figaro said one of its reporters, Edith Bouvier, was also injured.
The French government demanded access to the injured journalists, and summoned Syria’s envoy in Paris.
“I have asked our embassy in Damascus to require the Syrian authorities provide secure medical access to assist the victims,” Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said.
At least 13 Syrian civilians were also killed in the shelling, activists said, including a citizen cameraman whose videos of the assault were broadcast online.
Colvin, who was in her 50s, lost an eye in a grenade attack during an assignment in Sri Lanka in 2001 and wore a black eye patch in public. She spoke to UK news programs and CNN about the desperate plight of Homs on Tuesday.
Ochlik, 28, had covered the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and had his work published in Le Monde, Paris Match, Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
In Colvin’s final dispatch for the newspaper, published Sunday, she described how the streets of Baba Amr were deserted with regime snipers shooting at any civilians that came into sight.
“Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in upper floors,” she wrote. “The building I was staying in lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday. On some streets whole buildings have collapsed — all there is to see are shredded clothes, broken pots and the shattered furniture of families destroyed.”
Colvin was known for focusing on the plight of women and children in wartime. In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, she vividly recounted the death of an infant in Syria.
“I watched a little baby die today,” she said. “Absolutely horrific, a 2-year old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said ‘I can’t don’t anything.'”
French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed last month and a number of other reporters were injured when a shell exploded in Homs during a visit organized by the regime.
Since then, the situation has deteriorated in the city, and President Bashar al Assad’s forces have bombarded it for approaching three weeks. Hundreds of citizens have been killed in the assault, which has drawn widespread international condemnation.
The New York Times’ two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid died last week of an apparent asthma attack while covering a story in eastern Syria.
More than 7,000 people have been killed since protests against Assad’s rule flared in March last year.
The Sunday Times is published by News International, the UK arm of News Corp. which also owns NewsCore.
With AP