BAGHDAD - A senior Iraqi journalist was killed on Thursday when a suicide truck bomb exploded outside a television channel’s headquarters, the leading Sunni political party that owns the network said. “The Baghdad TV headquarters was targeted by a cowardly car bomb attack followed by a gun attack, killing deputy bureau chief the journalist Thaer Ahmed Jabr,” the Iraqi Islamic Party said in a statement. Another 12 employees of the 24-hour television channel were wounded, some of them seriously, it added.An Iraqi security official had said earlier that 10 Baghdad TV employees were wounded when a suicide bomber blew up a dump truck outside its offices in the capital’s western Al-Jamiyah district. “Since its establishment, the channel has been committed to a moderate national line and has always defended Iraqi citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation,” the Islamic Party added.
In the same neighbourhood, the body of an Iraqi journalist who was a prominent television newsreader during the time of Saddam Hussein was found on Thursday a day after she was kidnapped, a media rights group said. The Baghdad-based Journalistic Freedoms Observatory quoted one of her friends as saying Khamael Muhsin, who was working for radio and Kurdish television, was kidnapped in the Yarmuk district on her way home. When police recovered her body gunmen opened fire on them, the rights group said.
More than 150 media workers, 95 percent of them Iraqi, have been killed in Iraq in the four years since the 2003 US-led invasion.
| These people have true courage, not like the bar flies in the Green Zone. |