KEY POINTS:
A total of 126 journalists have now died in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003.
An Iraqi television cameraman, Aala Abdul-Kareem al-Fartoosi, who died when a roadside bomb blew up last week, was the first journalist to be killed in Iraq this year.
Mr
Fartoosi, 29, worked for al-Furat, the television station of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, one of the main Shia Islamic parties. He had left Baghdad at about 5pm on Tuesday for Samarra to cover the second anniversary of an attack on the Shia shrine in the city that provoked widespread killings.
Other workers at the television station told Mr Fartoosi to wait until the following day, but he said "the road was safe".
The bomb which killed him near the town of Balad, 80km north of Baghdad, also injured another correspondent, Fatma al-Hassani, in the leg, as well as the cameraman's assistant, Haider Jawad. The explosion almost certainly was not meant for the journalists but for a passing military or police vehicle.
The great majority of the journalists killed - 104 out of the total - were Iraqi, 13 were European and two were American. In addition, 49 media support workers have also been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in New York.
Iraqi journalists have died in almost every circumstance and at many hands. Sometimes there were direct attacks on buildings in which the media worked, such as the suicide bomber who drove a refuse lorry packed with explosives into the entrance of Baghdad TV's offices on April 5, 2007, killing the deputy director, Thaer Ahmad Jaber.
Other journalists have been killed because of the stories they were reporting or the political line of the publication, radio or TV for which they worked.
Iraqi workers for foreign media companies are particularly at risk. Aala Uldeen Aziz and Saif Laith Yousuf, a cameraman and a soundman working for ABC News, were ambushed and killed by gunmen in two cars.
Khaled Fayyad Obaid al Hamdani was shot dead by a US military patrol when he was driving to work, according to the Nahrain television station for which he worked. He was driving fast to avoid kidnappers but the US soldiers evidently suspected him of being a suicide bomber and shot him.
Many journalists have also been killed because they were Sunni or Shia caught in the wrong area or at the wrong checkpoint. Many were tortured before they died.
Others appear to have been abducted for ransom and killed when it was not forthcoming.
Iraqi journalists do much of the reporting for Western media organisations, because of the danger to any foreigner appearing in public.
Some foreign media have become prisoners of their own Western security companies and are mainly confined to their offices. This has kept casualties among Western journalists down but means much of the war is unreported.
- INDEPENDENT
