Anja Niedringhaus, Pulitzer Winner, 48, SHOT DEAD in Afghan Police Attack

Anja Niedringhaus

Anja Niedringhaus, the German photojournalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Iraq War, was shot dead by a policeman while on assignment in Afghanistan. She was 48.

Niedringhaus was killed yesterday while reporting on an election-commission convoy preparing for today’s presidential election in Afghanistan, according to Baryalai Rawan, a spokesman for the governor in Khost province bordering Pakistan. A Canadian reporter, Kathy Gannon, was wounded in the same attack. The women were seated in the back of a car when the officer fired.

A photographer for the Associated Press since 2002, Niedringhaus was the only woman in a team of 11 photojournalists from the AP who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in the breaking-news category for its coverage of the Iraq War. She was also the chief photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where she covered the conflict from Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to her website.

“For me, covering conflict and war is the essence of journalism,” she wrote for the Spring 2012 issue of Nieman Reports, a publication of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. “The legacy of any photographer is her or his ability to capture the moment, to record history. For me it is about showing the struggle and survival of the individual.”

Ironically her last tweet was that of the death of another Journalist she was reading about in the New York Times. 

The British Guardian even went as far as calling yesterday a SHITTY DAY! #UNCENSORED! every Journalist was very angry at this!!