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| Monday, 5 May 2003 |
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Press watchdog accuses US of war crimes against journalists PARIS, Sunday (AFP)-US attacks on a Baghdad hotel housing foreign journalists and on the office of an Arab television station were war crimes, the head of the international journalists' watchdog group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) charged. "Seeing an American tank firing at the Palestine Hotel and Americans hitting Al-Jazeera television, we're no longer talking professional risks. These are war crimes," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard. Two journalists were killed by a tank round fired into an upper floor of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel where foreign correspondents were based, and an Al-Jazeera correspondent was killed in a separate missile attack on the Arabic news network's offices in downtown Baghdad. The US troops claimed the fired on the hotel after being targeted by Iraqi gunmen who had taken refuge in the hotel. This has been denied by journalists present at the scene. The US-led war was "relatively more deadly for the journalists than for the troops in the Anglo-American force," Menard told AFP. He said the Americans had violated the Geneva conventions, under which journalists count as civilians in wartime and cannot become targets. |
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