09 January 2010
Rupert Hamer
Explosion
The defence correspondent of Britain's Sunday Mirror newspaper has become the first British journalist to be killed while covering the war in Afghanistan.
Rupert Hamer, 39, was accompanying a US Marine Corps patrol when an explosion from a device hidden outside a small village hit the vehicle he was travelling in on Saturday. The photographer Philip Coburn, 43, who had worked with Mr Hamer in several war zones, suffered severe leg injuries in the attack. He was in a serious but stable condition in the British military hospital at Camp Bastion in Helmand. The explosion, which also killed one US Marine and seriously wounded four, brought to 18 the number of journalists who have died in Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks as they seek to cover the US-led invasion and its aftermath. It is the first time that a British reporter has been killed in the conflict and Mr Hamer is the first UK correspondent to die in a warzone since the death of ITN’s Terry Lloyd in Iraq in 2003.
