Two ABC News staffers were killed in Iraq Thursday afternoon, ABC News President David Westin said Friday.
Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, a cameraman, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, were on their way home from work at the ABC Baghdad bureau when they were ambushed and murdered after being forced out of their car by unknown assailants, ABC said.
Westin announced the deaths to the news division in an e-mail Friday morning. "Our hearts go out to their families and friends. They will be deeply missed by their colleagues in Baghdad and by all of us in the ABC News family," he said.
Aziz had a wife and two daughters. Yousuf was not married, but leaves behind a fiancee, mother, brothers and sisters.
The Committee to Protect Journalists will have to add two more names to its roll of those journalists who have died in Iraq since the war began, which would bring that total to 104.
