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2000-2008
Miguel Gil Moreno De Mora
Kerem Lawton
Nazeh Darwazeh
Saleh Ibrahim
Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah
Ahmed Hadi Naji
Anthony Mitchell
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Miguel
Gil Moreno De Mora (1967-2000)
APTN producer and cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora,
was killed May 24, 2000, when rebels ambushed his vehicle
near Rogberi Junction in Sierra Leone. He was 32. A
native of Barcelona, Spain, Gil Moreno de Mora abandoned
a career as a corporate lawyer to work as a journalist.
His family said Gil Moreno felt called to his mission
of giving a voice to people who had none. He covered
conflicts for APTN in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Congo,
and Sierra Leone. He won the 1998 Rory Peck photographic
prize and the 1999 Television Technician of the Year
award from the Royal Television Society. His death brought
an outpouring of grief and tribute from inside and outside
the AP. “Miguel was intuitive, bold and one of
the most intelligent cameraman of his generation,”
said Nigel Baker, head of APTN news, “He had immense
respect from all who knew him not just for his work
but because he was a deeply modest man who would help
anybody he could.”
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Kerem
Lawton (1970-2001)
APTN producer Kerem Lawton was killed March 29, 2001,
when his car was hit by mortar fire near the volatile
Kosovo-Macedonian border. He was 30. Lawton was the husband
of APTN producer Elida Ramadani. Born in Brussels, Belgium
and raised in England, Lawton was the son of a Turkish
mother and a British father. Bilingual in Turkish and
English, he also spoke German, French and some Italian.
Lawton joined the AP as a newsman in Rome and later joined
APTN in Turkey. He immersed himself in assignments that
took him into the grimmest of circumstances – the
conflict in Kosovo, the Kurdish insurgency in southeast
Turkey, Albania’s 1997 plunge into near-anarchy,
ethnic tensions in China’s Xinjiang province. Yet
through it all, there was a sense of generosity about
him, an infectious sense of fun. “I do not exaggerate
in saying that he was everyone’s golden boy,”
said Rome Chief of Bureau Dennis Redmont, a family friend.
“He had a lightness in a profession where many people
are heavy hitters. Everyone wanted Kerem as his brother,
his boyfriend and his son.”
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Nazeh
Darwazeh (1959-2003)
APTN cameraman Nazeh Darwazeh was killed April 19, 2003
while filming a confrontation between Israeli soldiers
and Palestinians throwing stones and firebombs in the
West Bank city of Nablus. He was 43 and was hailed by
colleagues as a courageous cameraman who worked fearlessly
to ensure that events in Nablus were reported internationally.
Darwazeh began working for APTN in 2001 after the outbreak
of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Born into a large family,
Darwazeh studied at the University of Amman in Jordan.
He returned to Nablus in 1990 to work in one of his family’s
three photo studios, and later as a cameraman for Palestinian
TV. Darwazeh was married to Naela and the couple had four
sons and a daughter, ranging in age from four months to
11 years old.
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Saleh
Ibrahim (1971-2005)
In the days of Saddam Hussein, Saleh Ibrahim shot wedding
videos but dreamed of becoming a news cameraman. After
the fall of Hussein in 2003, the Iraqi native realized
his goal when he was hired first as a stringer and then
made APTN cameraman for Mosul, a northern Iraqi city.
The father of three was so dedicated to his work that
he taught his wife to transmit video to London via satellite
phone – enabling him to stay in the field shooting
without losing ground to competitors. On April 23, 2005,
Saleh and his brother-in-law, AP photographer Mohammed
Ibrahim, drove to the scene of an explosion in Mosul.
Shots were fired, killing Saleh, 33, and injuring Mohammed.
AP still does not know who fired the shots. "It’s
a double tragedy for me,” said Ahmed Sami, senior
APTN producer in Baghdad. “I have lost a friend
and a news champion in APTN’s Iraq network.”
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Aswan
Ahmed Lutfallah (1971-2006)
Nicknamed ‘The Eagle,’ APTN cameraman Aswan
Ahmed Lutfallah was known for his determination to get
the story no matter how difficult the circumstances. On
Dec. 12, 2006, the Iraqi native was having his car repaired
in eastern Mosul in northern Iraq when police and insurgents
began fighting. The 35-year-old rushed to cover the clash,
only to be shot to death by insurgents who spotted him
filming, according to Iraqi police. The insurgents also
stripped him of his camera equipment, cell phone and press
ID card. “He never, ever lost a story. He loved
his job and was dedicated to it. He only filmed what he
saw: The truth and nothing but the truth,” recalled
Ahmed Sami, senior APTN producer in Baghdad. Lutfallah
had begun working for AP as a cameraman in 2005. He was
married to Alyaa Abdul-Karim Salim and the father of 6-year-old
Yusof and an infant daughter Rafa.
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Ahmed
Hadi Naji (1978-2007)
Ahmed Hadi Naji left his home in the Ashurta Al Khamsa
district of Baghdad on December 30, 2006, headed to the
AP bureau on his red-and-white motorbike. When he did
not return home that night, his wife, Sahba’a Mudhar
Khalil, reported him missing. Six days later, on January
5, he was found in a Baghdad morgue, shot in the back
of the head. His killing remains unsolved. Naji, 28, joined
AP 2 1/2 years earlier as a messenger, but his love of
video cameras and his talent earned him a promotion to
cameraman. “He was over the moon with his work,”
said Ahmed Sami, APTN senior producer in Baghdad. “He
was a young guy who learned quickly and had a bright future.”
Naji had just become a father, and left behind four-month-old
twins, Zaid and Rand. His two brothers also worked as
bike messengers for AP.
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Anthony
Mitchell (1968-2007)
In 2006, AP reporter Anthony Mitchell was abruptly expelled
from Ethiopia following a series of stories about government
fraud and corruption. But that didn’t deter Mitchell.
The following year, as Nairobi correspondent, he uncovered
the illegal detention and transfer of terror suspects
from Kenya to Somalia and eventually into Ethiopian prisons.
He was returning from a trip investigating the criminal
trade in endangered species in the Central African Republic
when the plane he was on crashed in Cameroon on May 5,
2007. There were no survivors. Mitchell, a British citizen
who had also worked in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and London,
had two children: Tom, 3, and Rose, 1. “Anthony
was a fantastic father, husband and son,” said his
wife, Catherine Fitzgibbon. “He was the life and
soul of every party with a wonderful dry wit and a great
sense of humor. He lived life to the full and died doing
the job he loved.”
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