The deaths of two journalists in an attack by an American tank and troops on the Palestine hotel in Baghdad were the result of ”criminal negligence”, for which Washington must bear at least some responsibility, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said on Thursday.
In a report on the shelling which killed a Reuters cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, and José Couso of the Spanish television station Telecinco, the international media watchdog said it was ”inconceivable” that the US government and military command were unaware that up to 200 journalists had been working in the Palestine before the April 8 attack.
”Yet this presence was never mentioned to troops in the field or marked on maps used by artillery support soldiers,” the group said in its report, which was based on interviews with reporters who were in the hotel at the time and US soldiers.
”The soldiers on the ground, including Captain Philip Wolford, who authorised the shelling, and Sergeant Shawn Gibson, the tank gunner who fired the shot, did not know, and had never been told, that the hotel was stuffed with journalists,” said Jean-Paul Mari, the reporter who carried out the investigation.
”The question now is whether that information was withheld deliberately, out of contempt for non-embedded journalists, or through criminal negligence.”
The group called for the US investigation into who was responsible to be reopened. It said it would pass its findings to a Spanish investigating magistrate who will soon be opening a formal inquiry into Couso’s death.
Immediately after the attack, the Pentagon claimed an M1 Abrahams tank from the Third Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade had opened fire on the hotel in ”legitimate self-defence”, after ”enemy fire” from the building. This was repeated by US officials, including the secretary of state, Colin Powell, in a letter to the Spanish foreign minister in May.
But Sgt Gibson and Capt Wolford subsequently said the shelling had been intended to neutralise an Iraqi ”spotter” in the hotel, prompting the US army to change its version of events in a report published on August 12. That spoke of an ”enemy hunter/killer team”.
RSF accused the US authorities of staying silent on the real cause of the tragedy, and said the shelling of the hotel ”was due to criminal negligence”. Neither the soldiers who directly caused the journalists’ deaths, nor their immediate superiors could be held responsible, it said, because they had not been informed. – Guardian Unlimited Â