New York, March 23, 2003— Veteran ITV News correspondent Terry Lloyd, who disappeared in southern Iraq yesterday, is dead, according to the British television network ITN, which produces ITV News.
“There is now sufficient evidence to believe that ITV News Correspondent Terry Lloyd, 50, was killed in an incident on the Southern Iraq war front yesterday,” ITN’s Web site reported. ITN said it believed that the journalist’s body was in a hospital in Basra, which is still under Iraqi control.
ITN did not release the details of Lloyd’s death, but spokeswoman Katie Perrior told CPJ that their statement was based on information received from numerous sources in southern Iraq and at the Iraqi hospital in Basra, where Lloyd’s ID was found.
The other two journalists who disappeared with Lloyd, cameraman Fred Nerac and translator Hussein Othman, are still missing.
Lloyd, Nerac, and Othman disappeared yesterday, March 22, after coming under fire while driving to the southern Iraqi city of Basra. The journalists were not embedded with military forces.
The three journalists, along with cameraman Daniel Demoustier, were traveling in two marked press vehicles in the city of Iman Anas when they came under fire, ITN reported. According to Demoustier, they had been pursued by Iraqi troops who may have been attempting to surrender to the journalists. In a BBC report published yesterday, Demoustier said that the incoming fire to their vehicles came from U.S. or British forces in the area. The British Ministry of Defense is investigating the incident.
Demoustier, who was injured when the car he was driving crashed into a ditch and caught fire, managed to escape. He said he did not see what happened to Lloyd, who was seated next to him, or to the other crew members.
Lloyd is the second journalist who has been killed since U.S. and coalition forces launched their military assault on Iraq last week. Paul Moran, a free-lance cameraman for Australia’s ABC News, was killed yesterday, while filming at a checkpoint in northern Iraq when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb in his vicinity.
“CPJ mourns the loss of our colleagues Terry Lloyd and Paul Moran,” said CPJ acting director Joel Simon. “We express our deepest condolences to their families and friends.”
