Afghanistan is holding an election, of sorts. A "staggeringly shit day", as so many are during this endless war:
An Afghan police officer has shot dead a foreign photographer and badly injured another in the country's violent east, as they were covering preparations for the country's presidential election.
The man opened fire on Anja Niedringhaus and Kathy Gannon from the Associated Press in a police headquarters in Khost province, after the women arrived with a convoy of election materials on Friday.
Niedringhaus died almost immediately from wounds to her head, a health official said, and Gannon was taken to hospital with less serious injuries after being shot twice. She later underwent surgery and was described as being in stable condition and talking to medical personnel. Both were veteran correspondents with long experience covering Afghanistan.
Her extraordinary work can be seen
here and
here.
From AFP photojournalist Odd Andersen:
Anja Niedringhaus deserves to be remembered as one of the best photojournalists of the past two decades, and one of the most dedicated...
I know her family and her closest friends will feel her loss, but so will people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia. She gave underprivileged people a voice. She never lost sight of that: that the reason we do this job is so that at least people can't say they weren't aware, that they didn't know what was going on.
I remember during the early days in Bosnia one thing that infuriated us was how cheap the vehicles were that we had to use. Basically we had one decent vehicle and lots of cheap ones; when the bosses showed up, I was all in favour of making them travel in one of the inferior ones, but she insisted on giving them the good car. She always insisted on giving people the best. And ultimately she gave them her life.
On Wednesday, a suicide bomber
killed six at the ministry of interior. The war goes on.
Nothing gets
better. The war goes on.