THE ATTACK: 3 Journalists Die in U.S. Strikes on 2 Baghdad Buildings

April 8, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 — Scenes of near panic broke out today inside the Palestine Hotel here, with journalists rushing down darkened stairwells to the hotel forecourt, many wearing flak jackets and helmets, to escape a strike on the building that killed two of their colleagues.

The strike was inflicted by an American tank shell that destroyed a room on the 15th floor on the hotel's east side with a view of the battle raging across the Tigris River at the presidential compound.

Several reporters described seeing one of three tanks that had taken up positions on the western edge of the Jumhuriya bridge, a mile away to the northwest, raising its barrel and rotating it towards the Palestine moments before the impact.

In a room four floors down, about 100 feet from the point where the tank shell hit between the two rooms, the building shuddered as if an earthquake had struck.

Reports from the American military headquarters in Qatar quoted officers as saying at first that the tank fired only after it was fired at from positions in the hotel, an assertion challenged by witnesses.

The military did not reiterate the assertion of sniper fire in a later briefing. Officials said the strike on the Palestine and two other journalistic targets were being investigated.

"This coalition does not target journalists," said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks at Central Command.

He added that "anything that has happened as a result of our fire or other fires would always be considered as an accident."

The third journalist killed in an American strike today was Tariq Ayoub, 34, a reporter and producer for Al Jazeera television, the Qatar-based Arabic satellite channel. Mr. Ayoub, a Jordanian, was standing on the roof, preparing a live broadcast of the warfare in Baghdad, when the building was hit, a spokesman for the channel, Jihad Ballout, said at its headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

Mr. Ayoub was carried to a car by colleagues but died on the way to the hospital, Mr. Ballout said.

Abu Dhabi television said its offices, not far from Al Jazeera's, were hit by small-arms fire.

In the Palestine, many journalists had taken up positions on balconies on the hotel's northern side, on floors high enough to be able to have a clear view of the fighting going on. The two journalists killed, both of them television cameramen, were on balconies on the 14th and 15th floors, in rooms that were one above the other.

Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian citizen who was working for Reuters, was pronounced dead at the hospital within an hour, and José Couso, 37, a Spaniard working for a Spanish channel, Telecinco, died in surgery.

Iraqi officials joined with reporters in carrying the injured journalists down to the hotel forecourt, some of them in bloodied bedsheets. The three other Reuters staff members, one of them Lebanese, one British and one Iraqi, were expected to recover.

Muted scenes of anger were visible among colleagues of the two cameramen killed by the American tank shell at the Palestine Hotel, and among friends of Mr. Ayoub, the Al Jazeera cameraman killed during the day.

The journalists at the Palestine organized a 20-minute candlelit vigil at the hotel after dark, and debated among themselves whether there was justification in grieving for three dead journalists in a city where dozens of Iraqi civilians — people who mostly had no choice about being in Baghdad, unlike the journalists, all of whom are volunteers for the wartime assignment — had been killed on the same day.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company