2 Newsday Journalists Are Robbed, Threatened

NEWSDAY STAFF

November 21, 2001

A day after Afghan gunmen shot and killed four journalists for European news media near Kabul, two staff correspondents for Newsday and a correspondent for Cox Newspapers were attacked yesterday on the main highway heading east from the Afghan capital, threatened with execution and robbed before being released.

Matthew McAllester, Newsday's Middle East correspondent, and staff photographer Moises Saman were traveling on the main Kabul-Jalalabad road with Larry Kaplow, a reporter for the Cox newspaper chain, when three gunmen stopped them in the virtual no-man's land east of the capital.

They were ordered out of their truck and the gunmen searched them, taking about $120 from the journalists, McAllester said yesterday. The gunmen then trained their weapons on their captives, evidently intent on carrying out an execution.

The journalists' quick-thinking Afghan translator set off on a long and ultimately persuasive argument for sparing their lives, despite what one of the gunmen said was a general instruction from mullahs, possibly affiliated with the Taliban, that the gunmen kill as many foreigners as they could lay their hands on, McAllester said.

"Our translator saved our lives," McAllester said yesterday by telephone from Kabul. "We honestly thought that this was it. We really thought we were going to be executed."

After 30 minutes, the men were allowed to return to Kabul. "We were shaken up quite a bit," he said.

Since Afghanistan's ruling Taliban were routed last week from the capital and most parts of the country by the rebel Northern Alliance, the regions south, east and west of the Afghan capital have fallen into chaos. Fragments of militias, some freelancing and others affiliated with the Taliban, the Northern Alliance or other tribal warlords have taken to the hills, pillaging and killing innocents.

The bullet-riddled bodies of the four journalists killed Monday were retrieved yesterday from the same highway and packed into makeshift coffins. The International Committee of the Red Cross was arranging to transport the bodies to neighboring Pakistan.

The victims were Harry Burton, 33, an Australian television cameraman for Reuters; Azizullah Haidari, 33, a Pakistani photographer for Reuters; Maria Grazia Cutuli, 39, a reporter for Cor- riere della Sera newspaper in Milan; and Julio Fuentes, 46, of El Mundo newspaper of Madrid.

A Pakistan translator who was traveling with the group is missing.

In the past 10 days, a total of seven foreign correspondents have been killed on assignment in Afghanistan. On Nov. 11, two journalists for French radio and a reporter for the German magazine Stern were killed by Taliban fire north of Kabul while traveling with Northern Alliance soldiers.

-- Anonymous, November 21, 2001