A journalist working for the British newspaper The Guardian is missing, believed kidnapped, in Iraq, the daily said on Wednesday.
Rory Carroll, a 33-year-old Irishman, was on assignment in Baghdad when he disappeared, according to a statement from the newspaper, which said he could have been kidnapped.
As The Guardian‘s South Africa correspondent since 2002, Carroll was based at the Mail & Guardian newspaper offices in Johannesburg, South Africa, until last year.
“It is believed Mr Carroll may have been taken by a group of armed men,” the newspaper said on its website.
“The Guardian is urgently seeking information about Mr Carroll’s whereabouts and condition,” the statement read.
In his article in Wednesday’s edition of The Guardian, “Dictator on trial for life as Iraqi court faces ultimate test”, Carroll wrote about the trial of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, charged with crimes against humanity.
The journalist is one of the newspaper’s most experienced foreign correspondents and had been in Iraq for nine months.
He graduated from Dublin’s Trinity College and started his career as a reporter for the Irish News in Belfast.
Carroll was named Northern Ireland’s young journalist of the year in 1997.
He started on The Guardian as a domestic news reporter and was posted to Rome in 1999 to become Southern Europe correspondent.
He was then appointed South Africa correspondent in 2002 before heading to Iraq.