Iraq TV employees killed while filming show marking Ramadan
The four victims were abducted and killed in Mosul while filming a reality show that bestows gifts on the needy during the holy month. They were among at least 12 people slain nationwide.
BAGHDAD — Four employees of an independent TV station were abducted and killed today while filming a reality show that bestows gifts on needy people during the holy month of Ramadan.
The victims, killed in the northern city of Mosul, were among at least 12 people slain nationwide, including four in a bomb blast in eastern Baghdad and four Kurdish soldiers in northern Iraq.
The attack on the Sharqiya TV employees was stunning for its brazenness and brutality. Police in Mosul said the victims were grabbed as they filmed an episode of a program known as "Breaking the Fast Is on Us," which airs only during Ramadan.
During Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunup to sundown. The show concerns a crew making a surprise visit to a family and providing them with food and other gifts. A security spokesman in Mosul, Ryadh Jalil Tawfiq, said he would have provided protection to the crew but did not realize where they would be filming.
Tawfiq said the four TV employees -- two cameramen, the station's Mosul bureau chief and a driver -- were in a crowded area known as Zinjili when they were kidnapped. Some of the employees were filming inside a house while the others waited outside.
He quoted a fifth Sharqiya employee who was not abducted as saying the attackers blended in with the crowds in the densely populated district, grabbed the victims and disappeared. Hours later, their bodies were found with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
Violence has decreased across Iraq in recent months, though not for Iraqi journalists and media workers, who continue to be targeted routinely by insurgents and militias. On Tuesday, the Baghdad bureau chief for another Iraqi television station narrowly escaped death from a bomb hidden inside his car. The bomb was discovered before the correspondent got into the car and it exploded before police arrived, but nobody was injured.
Journalistic Freedoms, an Iraqi group, said 234 Iraqi and foreign journalists and media employees have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The organization said that 64 had been abducted and that, of those, 14 remain missing.
Tawfiq said police arrested two people in connection with the latest killings and were looking for two more.
tina.susman@latimes.com
Times special correspondents in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baghdad contributed to this report.
