Posted on 11/26/2003 10:33:27 AM PST by jempet
French mag's Iraq photo scoop From correspondents in Paris November 27, 2003
FRENCH weekly magazine, Paris Match, is to publish exclusive pictures of what it says are Iraqi rebels launching a missile attack on a German DHL cargo plane over Baghdad that led to a shutdown of commercial air traffic to the Iraqi capital.
The images were taken by one of the magazine's photographers, Jerome Sessini, who was with the attackers - described in the accompanying article as "Iraqi guerrillas" - at the time of Saturday's missile strike, editor-in-chief Alain Genestar told AFP today.
He said Sessini and a special correspondent sent to Iraq, Claudine Verniez-Palliez, had been with the group for several days beforehand and were unaware they were about to witness the attack.
"They had been asked to come see caches of arms very close to Baghdad and didn't discover the real reason for the operation until the last minute," Genestar said.
The pictures, seen in an advance copy of tomorrow's edition of the magazine, show a group of men wearing scarves over their heads and faces brandishing grenade launchers, and one man firing a shoulder-launched missile, said in the article to be one of two Russian-made "Strella" SA-7 surface-to-air units.
In the article, Verniez-Palliez writes the rebels thought they had spotted a US military plane and the leader gave the order to fire.
But Genestar rejected accusations that his magazine could be seen to be sympathising with the Iraqi rebels. "We don't make the perpetrators of this act to be heroes," he said, adding the correspondent and photographer had been brought back to France "for safety reasons".
Three pictures show a plane trailing smoke with a second smoke trail - said to be a second missile that missed the aircraft - behind it. There is also a close-up of a plane with DHL clearly marked on its side with smoke coming from its left wing, and a wider shot of a plane trailing thick white smoke from its left wing.
Genestar said there was no picture of the missile actually hitting the aircraft because that was "technically impossible".
The strike on the DHL Airbus A300 came just after it took off from Baghdad bound for DHL's Gulf hub in Bahrain.
The plane was forced to quickly turn around and make an emergency landing at Baghdad. No-one was hurt. It was the first successful strike on a civilian aircraft in the seven-month-old Iraq insurgency.
The next day, the US authorities occupying Iraq declared they had suspended all commercial air access to the city, though military flights would continue. The Paris Match photographs were not the first images said to document the attack.
Another French journalist in Iraq, Sara Daniel, correspondent for the Paris-based weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, showed other journalists a video she said had been left at her Baghdad hotel on Sunday.
The six-minute video, seen by AFP on Monday, shows one of a group of masked militants firing a missile that hits the DHL cargo jet.
Agence France-Presse
"Russia’s highest-ranking defector says State Department claims that no foreign or American journalists are engaged in espionage is absolute nonsense. Col. Stanislav Lunev reveals that many journalists from Russia and other countries are, in reality, spies. He also says that many Russian journalists have recruited leading American reporters to engage in espionage as well.
Col. Lunev was the highest-ranking spy ever to defect from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit. He did so while living and working in Washington as a TASS correspondent.
His story was deemed so vital by the CIA and FBI that he remains under the Witness Protection Program. He currently writes a column for NewsMax.com."
[RUSSIA DEFECTOR: LARGE NUMBER OF SPIES ACT AS JOURNALISTS]
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