Ciar Byrne, Media Guardian (UK)
Friday June 27, 2003

BBC world affairs editor John Simpson has called on the US government to investigate why more journalists were killed by American soldiers than by any other means during the Iraq war.

Simpson blamed the deaths of many of the journalists - what he called "the ultimate act of censorship" - on the system of embedding, which meant that journalists operating independently of US and British troops became "potential targets".

Of the 16 journalists who lost their lives within the space of just 21 days in the Gulf conflict, five died as a result of "depressingly explainable" accidents, three were killed by the Iraqis and seven died at the hands of the American forces, according to Simpson.

The sixteenth, Australian photojournalist Paul Moran, died when a suicide bomber blew him up in northern Iraq.

"In this war, the Americans were more than twice as dangerous to the proper exercise of journalism, the freedom of reporters to see for themselves what was happening, as the Iraqis were," said Simpson, delivering the Reuters memorial lecture today at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

The veteran war correspondent was himself injured in a "friendly fire" incident, in which the BBC's Kurdish translator, Kamran Abdurrazak Muhammed, was killed by a bomb dropped by a US warplane....

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