(AP)
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Syrian forces have resumed shelling an opposition stronghold in Homes today, one day after courageous war correspondent Marie Colvin, a Long Island native, was killed when Syrian government loyalists intentionally shelled her makeshift press center in the blood-soaked city — apparently to silence her reporting on the slaughter of civilians.
She was 56.
The award-winning reporter for London’s Sunday Times died along with a French photographer after 11 shells made a direct hit on the building, burying both.
Two other foreign reporters were wounded and are still trapped in Homs Wednesday, witnesses said.
The regime of Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad was able to pinpoint the press center by locking in on reporters’ cellphones.
Jean-Pierre Perrin, a reporter for France’s Liberation newspaper, who was with Colvin last week, said they were told the building would be deliberately targeted and that the army would be issued orders to “kill any journalist that sets foot in Syria.”
Direct orders, intercepted by Lebanese intelligence, to destroy the building were issued by the Syrian army, according to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.
Eight hours before her death, Colvin gave her last interview — from the press center where she was killed — telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that this assignment was the “worst” in her two decades-plus as a war reporter.
“There’s nowhere to run,” she said. “You can sort of figure out where a sniper is. But you can’t figure out where a shell is going to land.”
Tragically, Colvin left Homs over the weekend but returned Monday because she heard the army was planning a major offensive and wanted to get one last eyewitness account.
“I think reports of my survival may be exaggerated,” she wrote on Tuesday in response to an erroneous report that she had safely escaped the city.
Colvin had planned to leave Homs on Tuesday, but decided to stay until yesterday.
“That’s really bad because it was just one day,” her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, said tearfully in the living room of her East Norwich, LI, home.
“She was murdered. I’m very proud of her. But I’m going to miss her.
“I’m hoping to have her back. I want to bring her home one last time,” she said about whether she will receive her daughter’s body.
Marie Colvin exchanged e-mails with a friend, Katrina Heron, in which Colvin said she suspected that she would be targeted. “I do have the feeling that in the last hours of her life, she knew,” Heron told The Post.
Born and raised on Long Island, Marie Colvin graduated from Oyster Bay HS in 1974, then Yale, and began a fearless career covering war for The Sunday Times.
She went on patrol with the Kosovo Liberation Army in the Balkan war, covered East Timor rebels, and came under fire from Russian jets in Chechnya.
Last August, when she and other reporters were outside the Tripoli mansion of Moammar Khadafy’s son Muatassim during the dictator’s final days, she clambered up the outer wall — while her much younger colleagues held back until they were embarrassed into following her. Later, she got one of the last interviews with Moammar Khadafy.
While covering the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka in 2001, she was badly wounded by a government grenade.
“She nearly died,” her mother recalled, and for the rest of her life carried “shrapnel in her brain and in her chest.”
But the only outward sign was the black patch that she wore over her lost left eye.
Her mother said Yale classmate and Kennedy heir Robert Sargent “Bobby” Shriver, helped get her out of Sri Lanka. “They actually sent the Marines in from the embassy,” she said.
Shriver told The Post how moved he was by Colvin’s final interview, in which she described seeing a wounded 2-year-old baby die in a makeshift medical center in Homs.
“We just watched the little boy, his little tummy heaving and heaving as he tried to breathe. It was horrific,” she told CNN’s Cooper early yesterday morning.
“She gave her life to show that image,” Shriver said.
Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., which owns The Sunday Times and the New York Post, called Colvin “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,” he said.
Colvin knew the risks she was taking.
“Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices,” she said in a 2010 speech. “Sometimes, they pay the ultimate price. It has never been more dangerous to be a war correspondent, because the journalist in the combat zone has become a prime target.”
The Times of London and Associated Press