World

Killed In Pursuit Of Toughest Story

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

May 17, 2000 / 10:26 AM EDT / CBS

A cameraman for Associated Press Television News and a Reuters correspondent, both renowned for covering the world's most dangerous conflicts, and four Sierra Leone soldiers were killed when suspected rebels ambushed their vehicles, U.N. officials and local reporters said.

Spaniard Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, 32, of APTN and Washington native Kurt Schork, 53, of Reuters, died Wednesday after they were hit near Rogberi Junction, an area hotly contested in recent days by pro-government forces and rebels of the Revolutionary United Front, journalists said.

Letter From London

CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier worked with both men while covering Kosovo:

The world lost some amazing people this week. There was acting veteran John Gielgud, master of stage and screen, and the romance novelist Barbara Cartland, prolific as she was eccentric. They had the luxury of living out their lives, practicing their craft into their nineties.

But there were two more lives lost -- people you probably never heard of, but you knew their work.

Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, 53, a native of Washington state, and Associated Press Television Network cameraman Miguel Gil, 32, from Spain. They were cut down in a rebel ambush in Sierra Leone; two more journalists were wounded.

Gil was the only cameraman to stay in Kosovo throughout the entire NATO bombing last year. He caught war crimes on camera, including terrified Kosovars being herded onto trains, and forced to flee their country.

Schork had covered just about every war there was in recent times, from Bosnia to Chechnya to Kosovo. He gave an unforgettable firsthand account of a young couple, shot dead by a sniper as they tried to flee Sarajevo.

The two men were colleagues and friends, careful reporters who knew the dangers, but kept doing the job.

Of reporting from Chechnya, Gil told colleagues, "every minute of every day, you think you are going to die."

Now these guys wouldn't want your sympathy, and they weren't too comfortable with a lot of attention. They'd probably be really annoyed anyone was writing or saying anything about them. This was simply a job they loved.

But I've got to take this chance to note this — these two friends kept risking their lives to send us the pictures and the stories that turned strangers in strange lands, into people we know...hopefully, into people whose suffering we cnnot ignore, anymore than Schork and Gil could.

Two more Reuters journalists, South African cameraman Mark Chisholm and Greek photographer Yannis Behrakis, suffered slight injuries in the same attack.

Escorted by at least 10 pro-government soldiers, Gil Moreno de Mora and Schork were traveling in two vehicles when the group was ambushed about 50 miles east of the capital, Freetown.

In his account of the ambush carried by Reuters, Behrakis described a chaotic series of events, seeing Schork hit by gunfire and Gil Moreno de Mora's car attacked.

"There was a lot of shooting and for a second I saw Miguel's car behind getting hit," he wrote. Behrakis said he scrambled out the window of his moving car. With bullets flying between rebels and soldiers, Behrakis ran to a stretch of thick bush.

"At one point, the rebels walked 15 feet away but didn't see me," he said, adding he waited there for three hours before fleeing on foot back to Rogberi Junction.

Behrakis, other journalists on the scene and a U.N. official who spoke on condition he not be named said four soldiers were killed at the scene as well.

State Department acting spokesman Philip Reeker confirmed the attack and sent the department's condolences to the victims' families.

Gil Moreno de Mora was the 25th AP journalist to die in the line of duty since the organization was founded in 1848. Previously, APTN producer Myles Tierney was fatally shot in Sierra Leone a year ago and AP West Africa bureau chief Ian Stewart was also seriously wounded.

Gil Moreno de Mora began his professional life as a corporate lawyer but was drawn to the challenge of news reporting, which began with his coverage of the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. He went on to cover conflicts in Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq, Congo and other parts of the world for APTN.

Of reporting from Chechnya, Gil Moreno de Mora said in a recent first-person account: "Every minute of every day you think you are going to die."

Louis D. Boccardi, AP's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that "Miguel's death leaves us with an indescribable sense of loss. Our pain is not eased by the certainty that he was doing work he loved when tragedy struck.

"Professional accolades fade to the background at tragic moments like this but at least he lived to accept the honor, just last month, of being hailed as the Royal Television Society's cameraman of the year," he said.

Schork, a Rhodes scholar, had reported for Reuters for the last decade, and covered many of the same conflicts that Gil Moreno de Mora had. The two had been good friends since reporting from Bosnia, when they often worked closely together.

Reuters Editor-in-Chief Geert Linnebank called Schork a "courageous reporter, a courageous man who perhaps more than any other journalist highlighted the plight of the Kurds durin the Gulf War and later those victims of the Balkans conflicts."

Schork's Reuters colleagues observed a minute's silence in his memory in bureaux around the world at 1400 GMT on Thursday. Prayers for Schork and Moreno were read in St Bride's, the journalists' church in London's Fleet Street.

Referring to Schork as "an outstanding journalist and an exceptional human being," and remembering also Moreno and the their two injured colleagues, Michael Stott, Reuters editor for Continental Europe, Middle East and Africa, told staff: "May Kurt rest in peace, and may the journalistic ideals for which he died live on forever."

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said from New York that "the world doesn't always understand how much it owes" to journalists like Gil Moreno de Mora and Schork.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in New York that he was saddened to hear of the deaths.

"These were professionals, seeking to report on a bloody conflict that has already taken too many lives," he said.

William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said the organization condemned the killings and extended condolences to Gil Moreno de Mora and Schork's families.

Pro-government forces in the West African nation have been fighting the rebel Revolutionary United Front, which took hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers hostage early in May and then launched an advance toward Freetown. Government forces have been slowly pushing the rebels away from the capital since then.

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