Pakistan, Mexican journalists join memorial wall in Washington

By Julian Trauthig and Pat Reber

May 14--WASHINGTON -- Seventy-two journalists from around the world who died covering some of the worst conflicts in 2011 were honoured Monday in Washington as their names were added to a memorial wall.

Among them were seven journalists killed in Pakistan and another seven killed in Iraq -- the two countries with the highest death tolls last year.

The annual sombre event at the Newseum, on Washington's mall, drew about 70 journalists and family members who listened as each name was read, followed by the sounding of a gong. A moment of silence after all the names were read signaled their final entry into journalism history.

Alejandro Junco, the Mexican journalist who heads Grupo Reforma, was the keynote speaker, talking from his country's own tragic experiences. Covering the violence in Mexico cost four journalists their lives in 2011.
"The price of speaking the truth remains unforgivably high," Junco said.
The Pakistani journalists who were killed last year included Syed Saleem Shahzad, 40, who worked for the Italian news agency ADNKronos and the Asian Times Online; Nasrullah Khan Afridi, 38, of Pakistan Television Corporation; and Wali Khan Babar, 29, of Geo TV.
Shahzad's story stands out for the brutality of his killing by torture -- his rib cage was broken and internal organs crushed -- and for his high profile in the Pakistan media.
He was best known for his reporting on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and their possible links to the country's intelligence service and military.
He went missing on May 29, 2011, after writing a story for the Asia Times Online that linked al-Qaeda not only to a massive attack on a Pakistan Naval Air Station, but also to officials within the Navy.
"My brother was killed for writing the truth. He paid a huge price. He sacrificed his life but always spoke the truth," his brother is quoted as saying in the Newseum's electronic database.
Shahzad was regularly sought out by foreign journalists for tips on his connections to Islamist militants, whom he frequently interviewed, and to the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI.
Nine days before he died, Shahzad told Dexter Filkins, a reporter who covered the war in Afghanistan for The New York Times, that he increasingly feared for his life. He had been called in by the ISI to retract a story he had written in March about the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
According to an account Filkins wrote for The New Yorker magazine, Shahzad told him he had refused the ISI's request to retract the story.
By late May, Pakistani officialdom was in an uproar over the secret US raid on May 2 into its territory to kill bin Laden, who had been holed up for years not far from Islamabad. The suspicion was that someone somewhere in the Pakistani official security system must have known about bin Laden's presence.
After Shahzad's badly mauled body was found floating in a dam system, journalists and human rights activists pointed their fingers at ISI, which denied it had anything to do with Shahzad's murder.
One factor that raised suspicion about ISI was that Shahzad had apparently been picked up on a street in the high security Red Zone area of the capital. Ali Imran, a coordinator at the South Asia Free Media Association, noted at the time that the "whole thing was done in the daylight, on a busy street."
Shahzad's name is now among the 2,156 names engraved on the Newseum's two-storey glass panel that soars in a remote corner of the otherwise busy museum. After Monday's ceremony, family and friends laid a helmet and a reporter's notebook at the base of the wall that had belonged to two American photojournalists killed in Libya -- Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington.
The museum's location on Pennsylvania Avenue, with a clear view of the Capitol, is a statement about the role of a free press in democracy.
This article was distributed through the NewsCred Smartwire. Original article © dpa 2012