WUNRN
TWO WOMEN VETERAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
REPORTERS SHOT IN AFGHANISTAN, ONE KILLED
APRIL 4, 2014 -
Yet it was
those precautions that proved fatal for Ms. Niedringhaus on Friday morning. As
she and Ms. Gannon waited outside a government compound, a police commander
walked up to their idling car, looked in at the two women in the back seat, and
then shouted “Allahu akbar!” — God is great — and opened fire with an AK-47,
witnesses and The Associated Press said.
For both Afghans and Westerners, the list
of adversaries has expanded beyond the resilient Taliban, who have staged a
series of attacks in an attempt to disrupt the election. Afghan soldiers and
the police have repeatedly turned on one another and their foreign allies. The
squabbling between President Hamid Karzai and American officials has grown into
a deep-seated animosity.
At the same
time, Afghans have seen scores of their fellow citizens killed by errant
American airstrikes. And even as the
The dwindling number of foreigners here already live that way, frightened
by a recent surge in attacks
aimed at Western civilians.
Ms. Niedringhaus, 48, and Ms. Gannon, 60,
had no desire to hunker down. The focus of their work over the past dozen years
has been putting a human face on the suffering inflicted by the war. As a pair,
they often traveled to remote corners of
Many of their colleagues noted sadly that
they were attacked by a police officer who appeared to have seen in the back
seat of the journalists’ Toyota Corolla a pair of anonymous Westerners on whom
to vent his rage. If Afghans have a dominant complaint about the West, it is
that they are often treated as faceless, dismissed as nonentities by the people
who say they are here to help.
That was not the case with Ms.
Niedringhaus and Ms. Gannon.
“They just seemed so bravely willing to go
into these kinds of situations and get to the places that you needed to get to
tell stories that weren’t being told,” said Heidi Vogt, a reporter who worked
for The A.P. in Afghanistan until last year.
“They’re the last two people you’d expect
this to happen to,” she added. “It felt like they had a little protective force
field around them.”
In the process, they helped redefine
traditional notions of war reporting. Even as they covered the battlefield,
they also focused attention on the human impact of conflicts known for their
random, unpredictable violence against civilians.
Ms. Niedringhaus’s fascination with
“If I’d told her, ‘You don’t need to do
this anymore, you’ve earned your spurs, leave it to another generation,’ ”
said Tony Hicks, a photo editor at The A.P., “the response would have been a
series of expletives, then laughing and another pint.”
But, Mr. Hicks pointed out, Ms.
Niedringhaus was equally at home at major sports events and other less
high-stakes diversions, such as the
She was on the finish lines when Usain
Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, broke the world record for the 100-meter dash. And
“she loved
Ms. Gannon, a Canadian who is a senior
writer for The AP, arrived in
Ms. Gannon was in
“She knows
Though Western civilians working with the
coalition have at times been killed in such attacks, the shooting on Friday was
believed to be the first time an Afghan police officer had intentionally killed
a foreign journalist.
Afghan security officials said they
believed that the shooting was an opportunistic attack, not the work of the
Taliban, who offered no comment.
The police commander, whom officials
identified as Naqibullah, 50, was known for his anti-Western views, one
official said. The officials did not believe he had advance notice that Ms.
Niedringhaus or Ms. Gannon was headed his way.
The two spent Thursday night at the
compound of the provincial governor in Khost, and they left on Friday morning
with a convoy of election workers delivering ballots to an outlying area in the
Tanai district, The A.P. and Afghan officials said.
The convoy was protected by the Afghan police, soldiers and operatives from
the National Directorate of Security,
Mr. Naqibullah, the police commander,
surrendered to other officers immediately after shooting the journalists and
was arrested.
Ms. Gannon was taken to a hospital in
Khost. She underwent surgery before being evacuated to one of the main NATO
bases in the country, where there is a hospital equipped to handle severe
battlefield trauma. She was said to be in stable condition.
Yet even as Friday’s shooting provided a
stark reminder of how broader tensions can set off violence at the most
personal level, its aftermath also highlighted the bonds between old friends
and strangers alike, be they Afghans or foreigners.
Aides to Mr. Karzai, who has known Ms.
Gannon for years, said he tried to get her on the phone to see she how she was
doing after he heard about the attack. He later spoke with her husband, and his
office then put out a statement condemning the attack.
The doctor who first treated Ms. Gannon,
Muhammad Shah, was distressed by the shooting.
“Not only me, but all Afghans are
disappointed and sorry for this loss of life,” he said by phone Friday night
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