Yasser Salihee • Reporter Murdered :: Story He Died For

Scoop Editor’s Note: Thanks to the alert reader who brought these two items to our attention. The first item recounts the June 24th shooting by a U.S. army sniper of a reporter working for the Knight Ridder news service. The second item is an investigative report under the dead reporter’s byline, it relates an account of the reporter’s inquiries into the mysterious deaths of a large number of Iraqi’s, allegedly first detained by Iraqi police forces prior to being found murdered.

Yasser Salihee (4.00 / 6)

Thanks. Your comments mean alot. There has been a number of police actions directed at Sunni clerics that I probably could have reviewed, but this is the first piece that really felt like Negroponte’s Honduran fingerprints were all over it.
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by Hal C on Tue Jun 28th, 2005 at 05:49:35 AM PST

July 2, 2005 · My longtime translator in Iraq, Yasser Salihee, was killed at a checkpoint last Friday, June 24. He was also one of my dearest friends in the country, who would always say, “Let me know when you are coming. I want mine to be the first face you see.” He knew the brutal face of Iraq was all too present.

More and more, we are recognizing that it is Iraqis who are taking the greatest risks in the fact-finding business. It is they who go to bomb blast sites, they who talk to insurgents, they who go home late at night after we are safe in our barricaded compounds. At the time of his death, Yasser had been doing byline pieces as a special correspondent for Knight Ridder News Service. I last saw him just over a month ago, as he dropped off pictures for me of his family before I left Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq June 29, 2005 — Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi special correspondent for Knight Ridder, was shot to death in Baghdad last Friday. The shot appears to have been fired by a U.S. military sniper, though there were Iraqi soldiers in the area who also may have been shooting at the time.

Salihee, 30, had the day off and was driving alone near his home in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Amariyah when a single bullet pierced his windshield and then his skull. He was shot as his car neared a joint patrol of American and Iraqi troops who’d stopped to search a building for snipers. American and Iraqi soldiers are frequently targeted by suicide car bombers.

The U.S. Army is investigating the incident.

U.S. Humvees blocked three of the entry points to the intersection that Salihee was approaching. The one he was driving toward was manned by Iraqi and American soldiers on foot. It’s unclear how well he could have seen those troops, and whether they were standing in the road and waving motorists away, or taking cover by the side of the road in case of sniper attack.