Tyler Hicks, Lynsey Addario, Two Other Times Journalists Missing In Libya

 

By Donald R. Winslow
© 2011 News Photographer magazine

UPDATE: March 18, 2011 9:00 a.m. – Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's son Seif Islam el-Qaddafi said the journalists had been captured and will shortly be released.

 

NEW YORK, NY (March 16, 2011) – It has been more than 24 hours since editors at The New York Times have heard from four journalists covering the civil unrest in Libya, and they are now considered missing and unaccounted for, according to the Times.

Missing are photojournalist and NPPA member Lynsey Addario, photojournalist Tyler Hicks, videographer Stephen Farrell, and Beirut bureau chief Anthony Shadid.

When editors last heard from them the four were covering a developing story as Libyan government troops moved into the port city of Ajdabiya to engage forces with the rebels.

There were second-hand reports that the journalists may have been swept up by Libyan troops. Times executive editor Bill Keller said the Times has been in contact with the Libyan government in Tripoli, and that the government is trying to ascertain the journalist's whereabouts and assured him they would be released unharmed if they had been captured.

All four journalists are highly experienced at covering war and conflict, a Times photography editor told News Photographer magazine Wednesday, and they will know how to contact their editors if at all possible.

Until this week, photojournalist John Moore of Getty Images was working alongside Addario and Hicks covering the Libyan rebels. Moore left Libya when it was time for another Getty photojournalist to come in and replace him last weekend, but Getty editors decided the situation was going downhill in Libya too quickly and that it was no longer safe to have their people on the ground with the rebels so Moore left without being replaced. Moore had seen Hicks and Addario at the house where Times staff were making their base, and he knew from communicating with Hicks that there was a plan for them to go out to cover the rebels if they were fleeing government troops.

"The combined experience, the years of covering conflict, of these four people together is really quite extraordinary," Moore told News Photographer magazine. "They know what they are doing. I've worked with them for so long that I know they were being cautious."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Wednesday said the administration is aware of the four missing journalists and urged the Libyan government not to harass, detain, or hurt any journalists.

"We strongly urge the governments in the entire region - in this case, those in Libya - to protect journalists, allow them to do their work, do not harass or in any way detain or use violence against journalists," Carney said in his daily briefing Wednesday. "Our overall stand is very firm that journalists, American journalists, need to be allowed to do their work, not harassed, and not detained."

Libya has grown increasingly dangerous for journalists in the past week, and some editors have pulled their reporters and photographers out of the danger zone.

On Saturday a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, Ali Hassan al-Jaber, was killed and correspondent Baybah Wald Amhadi was wouned when their car was ambushed near Benghazi.

Last week three BBC employees were detained, beaten, and subjected to mock executions by Libyan soldiers before they were released. The trio had been trying to reach the western Libyan city of Zawiya.

A few days ago Addario wrote "At A Deadly, Shifting Front In Libya" for the LENS blog on the Times' Web site, and Hicks wrote an account of some of the most fierce and brutal fighting he's ever witnessed in any war, anywhere, in a LENS article headlined "In The Thick Of Libya's Brutal Fighting."

Addario is an NPPA member who won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship 'Genius Grant" in 2009, the same year she shared a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with New York Times staff members. She regularly shoots for the Times and National Geographic.

Hicks is a Times staff photographer known for his war photography who has covered conflict in Kosovo, Chechnya, Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan before the uprising in Libya. He was also part of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize won by the Times. He's been staff at the Times since 2002 and before that he was a contract photographer for the paper from Kenya beginning in 1999. His newspaper career started at The Troy Daily News in Ohio and The Wilmington Star-News in North Carolina, and he was the Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2007 in the University of Missouri's Pictures of the Year International contest.

Farrell was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in September 2009 and a British commando raid on their hideout resulted in his rescue, but a Afghan translator and a woman and a child were killed in the raid. He had been reporting on the aftermath of NATO air strikes when he was abducted. In 2004 he was kidnapped while on assignment in Fallujah, Iraq. He's been with the times since 2007 after reporting for The Times of London.

Shadid formerly worked for The Boston Globe and today he's the New York Times bureau chief in Beirut. Before joining the Times he was the Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post. He's a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of the invasion of Iraq and later his coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

 

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