Two journalists killed in Iraqi missile attack

A German and a Spanish journalist "embedded" with US forces were killed yesterday in an Iraqi missile attack on an operations centre on the southern outskirts of Baghdad.

The deaths of Julio Anguita Parrado, from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, and Christian Liebig, who worked for a German weekly news magazine, Focus, bring to seven the number of correspondents confirmed killed covering the war.

Mr Anguita Parrado, 32, a son of the former Communist party leader Julio Anguita, was based in New York and had covered the 11 September attacks.

Both journalists were with the US 3rd Infantry Division. Fifteen other people were wounded in the missile attack.

Also yesterday, two Polish reporters were kidnapped by armed men at a checkpoint near Hillah, 80 miles south of the capital, where irregular forces were continuing to put up fierce resistance.

Marcin Firlej, of the private TVN24 news channel, and Jacek Kaczmarek, 31, a Kuwait-based correspondent with Polish state radio, were travelling with a group of journalists who had set out from Nasiriyah on their way to Karbala.

One of the group, Marcin Woroch, said "five or six armed men, some still in military uniforms, some in black" stopped the convoy at the checkpoint after the journalists had left the main road. Fedayeen militiamen are clad in black.

Death toll

Combatants

American

Killed in combat: 69 (includes six US helicopter crew previously not registered missing or dead)

Accidental and other deaths: 22

Missing: 14

Captured: 7

British

Killed in combat: 9

Accidental and other: 21

Missing: 0

Iraqi

Killed in combat: More than 3,600

Missing: No accurate figures

Other

Killed: At least 75 Kurds, including 18 who died on Sunday in a 'friendly fire' bombing by a US warplane

Civilians

British

Killed: 1

Iraqi

Killed: At least 1,252, according to estimates by the Iraqi government

Other

Killed: 12 (a French television journalist; an Australian cameraman; a Jordanian taxi driver in Baghdad; an Iranian cameraman working for the BBC; five Syrian bus passengers; an American journalist, two journalists killed in a rocket attack yesterday)

Missing: 9 (an Arab TV correspondent, two ITN crew, four Médecins Sans Frontières workers, two Polish journalists abducted by Iraqi forces)