veteran war reporter Marie Colvin & photographer killed

Syrian forces murdered journalist Marie Colvin after pledging to kill 'any journalist who set foot on Syrian soil', it emerged today. The 55-year-old Sunday Times reporter died alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik, 28, in a rocket attack on the besieged city of Homs this morning. She had lost her eye in an attack while covering ethnic conflict in Srilanka in 2001. 

Marie Colvin's 30-year career journalism saw her, having graduated from Yale, take up the post of Paris bureau chief for United Press International in 1984 before she moved to the Sunday Times a year later.

There she was Middle East correspondent for a decade, from 1986 to 1995, before becoming foreign affairs correspondent.

Although her area of speciality was the Arab and Persian world, she also worked in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, where she was injured and blinded when she was ambushed in 2001 by government soldiers because of her work with the Tamil Tigers.

A grenade attack left her blind in one eye and was forced to wear a black eye patch to cover up the injury.

She won the British press award for 'Best Foreign Correspondent' twice, for her work in reporting the conflict in Yugoslavia, Iran, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe; the International Women’s Media Foundation award for 'Courage in Journalism' for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya, and the Foreign Press Association's Journalist of the Year award.

She is a patron of Reporters Sans Frontieres and Child Hope.

Marie Colvin was born in Oyster Bay, New York.

She lived in Hammersmith, west London, and was married three times, but had no children.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104711/Marie-Colvin-dead-Journalist-killed-Homs-Syria-hours-ITN-News-At-Ten-broadcast.html#ixzz1n8CmaQ9Z