ITN's Lloyd killed by US gunship, claims Iraqi

The ITN reporter Terry Lloyd may have been killed in an attack by a US gunship while he was being taken to hospital for treatment of minor wounds, it was claimed yesterday.

An Iraqi businessman told a national newspaper that he came across Mr Lloyd after the journalist had been caught in crossfire between American and Iraqi soldiers.

Hamid Aglan said that when some Iraqi soldiers flagged him down and requested to be taken to hospital, Mr Lloyd asked whether he could come along too. He said Mr Lloyd had suffered only relatively minor wounds in the firefight on 22 March.

It had been thought that Mr Lloyd was killed outright during the initial shooting. But Mr Aglan says he picked up Mr Lloyd in his Mitsubishi minibus after the first attack and the award-winning journalist died later when a helicopter gunship attacked the vehicle.

Mr Aglan claims: "The journalist would certainly have lived if I'd got him to hospital ... But after the helicopter attack he stopped moving and was covered in blood."

ITN said yesterday that it did not believe that the new evidence reported by the Daily Mirror was credible.