Iraqi New York Times journalist killed
BAGHDAD - An Iraqi journalist for The New York Times was shot to death Friday on his way to work, less than an hour after he called the bureau to say a checkpoint had blocked his normal route, the newspaper said.
Khalid W. Hassan was the second Times employee to be killed in Iraq, the newspaper said.
Gunmen killed Hassan, 23, in the southwest Baghdad district of Sadiyah, according to a statement from the Times spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis.
The newspaper reported on its Web site that Hassan had called the bureau to say he was blocked by a checkpoint. A half-hour later, the paper said, he called his mother and told her: “I’ve been shot.”
He “was shot and killed on the way to work,” the Times statement said. “The circumstances of the attack remain unclear at this time.”
Hassan, who worked for the paper in Baghdad for four years, “was part of a large, sometimes unsung community of Iraqi news-gatherers, translators, and support staff, who take enormous risks every day to help us comprehend their country’s struggle and torment,” Bill Keller, the Times executive editor, said. “Without them, Americans’ understanding of what is happening on the ground in Iraq would be much, much poorer.”
The first Times employee killed in Iraq, Fakher Haider, 38, was shot to death in 2005 in the southern city of Basra.
Hassan’s slaying came a day after two Iraqi staffers of the London-based Reuters news agency — a photographer and a driver — were killed by clashes between U.S. forces and Shiite mililtiamen in east Baghdad.
At least 110 journalists and 40 media support staffers have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, according to the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists. More than 80 percent of media deaths have been Iraqis.