Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero told reporters the four reporters
attacked and abducted in Afghanistan earlier Monday were confirmed as dead.
According to Reuters -- for which two of the reporters worked -- Ruggiero
told reporters at an EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels:
``Through contacts with the crisis unit there, we have evidence that the four
bodies found correspond to the four journalists.'
The four were identified as Reuters reporters Harry Burton, an Australian
television cameraman, and Azizullah Haidari, an Afghan-born photographer; Julio
Fuentes of Spain's El Mundo and reporter Maria Grazia Cutuli of Italy's Corriere
della Sera.
The four were in a caravan of cars moving from Pakistan to the Afghan capital
of Kabul at the time of the ambush.
A driver and translator were reportedly let go after begging for their
lives.
CNN reported earlier that the area in which they were attacked is believed to
be an uncontrolled one, and that the convoy was traveling without the customary
armed guard.
- Dan Trigoboff
