(REUTERS) Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana, 43, was shot dead by an American soldier on 17 August as he was filming Abou Ghraib prison in a suburb of Baghdad. US officials said the soldier mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. A veteran who had worked for the British news agency Reuters for 10 years, Dana won an international reputation for his coverage in his home town of Hebron in the Occupied Territories. He was roughed up and injured several times by Israeli soldiers and settlers while trying to shoot footage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Guardian: Journalists who were with a Reuters news cameraman shot dead by US troops while filming outside a Baghdad prison yesterday accused the soldiers of behaving in a "crazy" and negligent fashion. They claimed the Americans had spotted the Reuters crew outside the jail half an hour before Mazen Dana was killed and must have realised he was not a guerrilla carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. (...) "A soldier on the tank shot at us. I lay on the ground. I heard Mazen and I saw him scream and touching his chest. I cried at the soldier, telling him 'you killed a journalist'. They shouted at me and asked me to step back and I said 'I will step back but please help, please help'." He said they tried to help but Dana was bleeding heavily. "Mazen took a last breath and died before my eyes." Stephan Breitner, of France 2 television, added: "We were all there for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists. After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was an accident. They are very tense. They are crazy."