26) Shots Rang Out From The Palestine Hotel, Directed At U.S. Soldiers, Just Before A U.S. Tank Fired On The Hotel, Killing Two Journalists.
26) Shots Rang Out From The Palestine Hotel, Directed At U.S. Soldiers, Just Before A U.S. Tank Fired On The Hotel, Killing Two Journalists.
Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire from the hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the hotel, U.S. forces had bombed the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, killing a Jordanian reporter. Taken together, and considering the timing, they were deemed a warning to unembedded journalists covering the fall of Baghdad around them. The day's events seem to have been an extreme instance of a more surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by U.S. and UK forces toward foreign journalists and those non-attached Western reporters who moved around the country at will. (One of them, Terry Lloyd of Britain's ITN, was shot to death by UK troops at a checkpoint in late March under circumstances the British government has refused to disclose.)
Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the U.S. sent in a commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were known to be occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers were held on the floor at gunpoint while their rooms were searched. A Centcom spokesman later explained cryptically that intelligence reports suggested there were people "not friendly to the U.S." staying at the hotel. Allied forces also bombed the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.
