Peshawar | Wednesday
FOUR journalists killed in a roadside ambush in Afghanistan had been stoned as well as shot to death, a Red Cross official said Wednesday as the bodies arrived in Pakistan.
The four bodies were carried to the Torkham border post from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad in two vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Colleagues of the victims were on hand for the arrivals.
The corpses were due to be taken to the Khyber Medical College in Peshawar and were to be handed over to representatives of their respective embassies.
The three men and one woman were attacked by gunmen Monday on a road east of Kabul as they were trying to reach the Afghan capital.
An ICRC official who asked not to be named said a preliminary examination of the corpses indicated the victims had been ”brutally murdered.”
”They were stoned and fired upon with a number of bullets in their chest and arms and other parts of the body,” the official said.
The four journalists were Reuters cameraman Harry Burton and photographer Azizullah Haidari, Spanish correspondent Julio Fuentes and Italian reporter Maria Grazia Cutuli.
There was no immediate word on who killed them. The road that leads from Pakistan to Kabul via Jalalabad was known to be plagued by bandits and rogue elements of the Taliban militia.
The four victims were travelling in a convoy that was stopped two hours outside of Jalalabad by six gunmen who opened fire on their vehicles with Kalashnikov rifles, according to witnesses.
The bullet-riddled bodies were left alongside the road and recovered on Tuesday by soldiers affiliated with the local administration in Jalalabad, where they were taken pending transport to Pakistan.
The deaths brought to seven the number of journalists killed in Afghanistan in an eight-day span.
Two French radio correspondents and a German freelance reporter died in an ambush by Taliban forces in the northeast on November 11. – Sapa-AFP
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