Foreign journalists in Freetown observed a minute's silence at the start of the daily UN press briefing in the Mammy Yoko hotel yesterday to pay tribute to their two colleagues killed the day before in an ambush of an army patrol by Sierra Leone rebels.
Kurt Schork of Reuters and Miguel Gil Moreno of Associated Press were killed along with four pro-government soldiers in a rebel ambush near Rogberi Junction, 60 km north-east of Freetown.
Kurt Schork (53), an American, had forged a reputation for courage and professionalism covering the world's conflict zones. Schork had reported for Reuters for the past decade, and his reports appeared regularly in The Irish Times. He was killed along with Miguel Gil Moreno (32), a Spanish cameraman and producer working for Associated Press.
Schork was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He gave up business in the US to follow his dream of becoming a war correspondent, covering conflicts from Africa to Afghanistan.
He will be best remembered for his coverage of the siege of Sarajevo and the wider Balkans wars of the 1990s.