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NEW YORK - Gunmen killed two ABC News employees in Iraq in the latest attack on journalists in the war-torn country, the US news organisation said tody.
The men were identified as cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, ABC News said in a statement.
"Today, we've lost two family members, and it really hurts," Terry McCarthy, ABC News' Baghdad correspondent, said on the organisation's website. "We have Iraqi camera crews who very bravely go out ... without them we are blind, we cannot see what's going on."
The two were returning home from work at the ABC News Baghdad bureau on Thursday when they were stopped by two cars full of gunmen and forced out of their car, the statement said. They were confirmed dead Friday morning.
There were no details available on their attackers.
The deaths brought the number of journalists killed in Iraq since 2003 to 104, making it the deadliest conflict for media in 25 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
"This senseless attack underscores why Iraq remains the most dangerous assignment in the world," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said in a statement. "No journalist is safe in covering this story, especially local Iraqi reporters who have suffered the brunt of media casualties."
Iraqis have accounted for 83 per cent of all media deaths in the country, the group said.
Several US television journalists became casualties in attacks last year on military convoys.
ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff was badly wounded, along with his cameraman, Doug Vogt, by a bomb blast in January 2006 while on assignment near Baghdad.
In May of that year, two British journalists working for CBS, Paul Douglas and James Brolan, were killed, and American CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier was severely wounded, when a car bomb struck a US military patrol in Baghdad.
Aziz is survived by his wife, two daughters and mother, and Yousuf by his fiancee, mother and brothers and sisters, ABC said.
- REUTERS
