Reporters Sans Frontières

Published on 26 February 2005

Reporters Without Borders voiced "horror" today at the murder of Iraqi journalist Raeda Mohammed Wageh Wazzan of the regional public TV station Iraqiya, who was found dead on 25 February, five days after she and her son were kidnapped by masked gunmen in the centre of the northern city of Mosul.

"We are horrified by this vile murder, for which there is no justification, and we must stress yet again that journalists are neither belligerents nor bargaining chips," the press freedom organization said.

Reporters Without Borders added: "Our thoughts go out to Raeda Wazzan’s family, especially her husband and son." Wazzan’s 10-year-old son was released by her abductors after three days. It was her husband, Salim Saad-Allah, who announced on 26 February that the body of Wazzan, 40, had been found the previous day. She was shot in the head.

The motive for her kidnapping is still unclear. There was a mortar attack on Iraqiya’s studios on 16 February in which three technicians were injured. Two days before that, Iraqiya producer Jamal Badrani was the target of a kidnapping attempt. The Associated press (AP) reported that Wazzan’s murder was claimed on the Internet by an armed Iraqi grouped linked to Al-Qaeda but their was no way of verifying the claim’s authenticity.

Wazzan was the 21st journalist to be kidnapped in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003. She is the second to be murdered by her abductors, after Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni in August 2004. Her death brings the number of journalists killed in Iraq since March 2003 to 33.

Mohammad Sherif Ali, an Iraqi journalist working for the US-run, Arabic-language TV station Al-Hurra, was badly wounded when gunmen fired on his car the same day in Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad, killing his driver.