US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, killed

John Stevens with Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil in July, shortly after being named US Ambassador to Libya

Mr Stevens and three other embassy employees were killed in an attack on their car on Wednesday. In a recent letter to friends, the slain ambassador expressed hope, as Harvey Morris of the New York Times's Rendezvous blog reports: "I last heard from Chris Stevens two months ago, just after he hosted a July 4 reception in the gardens of the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Libya. 'Somehow our clever staff located a Libyan band that specializes in 1980s soft rock,' he wrote, 'so I felt very much at home.' In a catch-up e-mail to family and friends, Mr. Stevens described his first six weeks back in Libya, a country he knew well, this time as the U.S. ambassador.

"Mr. Stevens appreciated the ironies of having to rely on security cooperation from the formerly “terrorist” Qaddafi regime when he was posted in Libya from 2007 after the U.S. restored relations with Tripoli. The regime fretted that the Americans would be targets for Islamic militants. Mr. Stevens had many friends in the Arab world, including those who yesterday paid tribute to him in social media messages. On Facebook yesterday, Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, an Egyptian novelist and former diplomat who knew Mr. Stevens from Jerusalem, posted: “One of the best people I met, an American who understood and empathized with the Arab predicament.”