[Reuters]

Published date: 28th Nov 2001

28 November 2001

Reuters News

English

(c) 2001 Reuters Limited

HOBART, Australia, Nov 28 (Reuters) – Australian Harry Burton, a Reuters cameraman killed with three other journalists in Afghanistan last week, was buried on Wednesday after a church service attended by family, friends and colleagues. Burton, 33, was laid to rest next to his mother after an emotional service at St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Hobart on Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania. Burton, Reuters colleague Azizullah Haidari, Spaniard Julio Fuentes of El Mundo and Italian Maria Grazia Cutulivof Corriere della Sera were shot dead in an ambush on November 19 as they drove from Jalalabad to the Afghan capital of Kabul. Reuters Editor-in-Chief Geert Linnebank, Asia-Pacific Editor Chaitanya Kalbag and Reuters Video News Editor Rodney Pinder were among the 450 who gathered to pay tribute to Burton and to offer condolences to his father, four sisters and three brothers. Also present were the Tasmanian state premier, Jim Bacon, and a representative of the head of the Australian Army, Lieutenant General Peter Cosgrove, who befriended Burton in East Timor. Next to Burton’s coffin sat a television camera. Father Brian Nichols paid tribute to all four journalists killed. A total of eight journalists have been killed in Afghanistan in recent weeks. “Harry’s death has brought home to me an awareness of the commitment and dedication of those who provide us with information about events which happen in other parts of the world … where the lives of many are in danger,” said Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Adrian Doyle in a condolence note. Burton came to journalism relatively late but quickly built an enviable reputation as a multi-media correspondent who regularly supplied text stories with the images he recorded. He had worked for Reuters for almost two years in Jakarta after making his name with his frontline cover of East Timor’s bloody breakaway from Indonesia in 1999. A warm and easy-going man, Burton was also a cameraman of courage. His images brought home to the world the human consequences of the brutality of the ethnic, religious, and political strife in Indonesia. The last story he filed was an evocative account of a Jalalabad schoolroom where children learned to shoot guns for Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. Haidari, an Afghan-born photographer who was also 33, had spent half of his life as a refugee In Pakistan. He was buried in a Muslim ceremony in Islamabad last week. Burton and his three colleagues were covering the U.S .- led war in Afghanistan, launched last month in response to the September 11 suicide plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon which killed 3,682 people.