Waldemar Milewicz
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Waldemar Milewicz (August 20, 1956 in Dobre Miasto – May 7, 2004 in Latifiya) was a Polish journalist and war correspondent who was killed in a drive-by shooting in Iraq.
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[edit] Career
Milewicz's undergraduate studies were in psychology. In 1981 he started his career in the Polish public television, TVP. Since 1991 he was working in the news division. He travelled all over the world to most areas of armed conflict to report for TV and make documentaries, among others Abkhazia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Somalia and Rwanda. Thanks to his excellent documentaries Dziwny jest ten świat (This is a Strange World) he became one of the best-known reporters in Poland.
[edit] Death
On May 7, 2004, the car he was returning from Baghdad to the Polish base Camp Babilon. It is believed that their car was followed by a group of Iraqi insurgents in another car. Milewicz's car was clearly marked with a 'press' sticker and despite that when the attackers caught up with it they opened machine gun fire. Milewicz was hit first and died instantly. Another member of his crew, a Polish-Algerian Mounir Bouamrane, was killed on the site when he had left the vehicle. The crew cameraman, who was in the car, a Polish citizen Jerzy Ernst, was wounded in the arm by gunfire.
The mission in Iraq was meant to be the last mission of Milewicz, because of his health problems.
In 2006, coalition troops detained the three killers of the Polish journalists, including the leader of the terrorist group. One of them testified that the leader of his group had received information that the victims were headed in their direction, supposedly from Iraqi Police officers who had inspected the car with the journalists as they left Baghdad. The detained man also confessed to about 40 other attacks on a military and civilian targets.[1]
[edit] Honours
Milewicz received many awards and prizes for his work, among the most important are: SAIS-Ciba Prize for Excellence in Journalism by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1995 for his work in Chechnya and in 2001 the Polish "Reporter of the Year Award".
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