BBC reporter killed in Croatia

MATTHEW BRACE

A British radio journalist, John Schofield, was shot dead in Croatia yesterday when the convoy in which he was travelling was attacked.

The BBC said the 29-year-old reporter was believed to have been travelling with a convoy near the Bihac region when it came under attack from Croatian forces. Two colleagues were also injured. The Croatian defence minister said rebel Serbs were to blame.

Mr Schofield was covering the conflict for the BBC and was compiling a programme for Radio 4's The World Tonight. The BBC said he died immediately while Adam Kelleher and Omar Asawi, from BBC World Service Television, suffered ricochet wounds. A fourth member of the party, Jonathan Burchill, also from the World Service, was unhurt.

Mr Schofield, who was married, had been a reporter for eight years after graduating from Sussex University. He began his career at ITN and joined the BBC last year. Since 1991, 76 journalists have been killed in former Yugoslavia, more than in the conflicts in Vietnam and El Salvador.

In Dvor yesterday, also in the Bihac region, soldiers who appeared to be members of the Bosnian army killed five mentally handicapped people, while in Washington a State Departement official said the US had evidence of a freshly-dug field near the UN "safe haven" of Srebrenica, overrun by Bosnian Serbs, suggesting bodies could have been bulldozed into a mass grave.

US push for peace, page 11