Latifiya, Iraq, May 07: An award-winning Polish television journalist and an Algerian colleague were killed today in a drive-by shooting in Iraq, their driver told and their employer, Poland's TVP television, confirmed. Waldemar Milewicz, 48, and his picture editor, Mounir Bouamrane, 36, had just arrived in the country and were driving to the polish military base at Babylon south of Baghdad when they were killed, according to diplomatic sources in Warsaw.
A Polish cameraman, Jerzy Ernst, was also wounded in the attack on their nondescript family car at Latifiya, 30 kilometres south of Baghdad.
Their Iraqi driver, Assir Kamel al-Kazzaz, told gunmen closed in from behind in a car and raked their vehicle with gunfire, killing Milewicz in the back seat.
The victims' car spun before coming to a halt. The gunmen then turned their vehicle round and fired on the others who had got out, killing Bouamrane and injuring the cameraman.
A passing police car picked up Ernst and took him to hospital after the incident, which happened around 9:30 am (1100 IST).
Milewicz, who had been working for TVP since 1984, was a seasoned war correspondent who had covered numerous conflicts including in the Balkans, Chechnya, Cambodia and Rwanda.
His film "Chechnya: Six Days of War" won a journalism prize from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1995. The previous year, the German Marshall fund had awarded him a prize for his coverage of the Rwandan genocide.
Bureau Report