] Baghdad%u2014First the Americans killed the correspondent
] for Al-Jazeera yesterday and wounded his cameraman.
]
] Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters
] Television bureau in Baghdad and killed one of its
] cameramen, father of an 8-year old son, and wounded three
] other staff members. Also fatally wounded was a cameraman
] for the Spanish television network Telecinco
]
] Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was
] it possible that the right word for these killings %u2014
] the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an Abrams
] tank - was murder?

Back in 2001, the U.S. fired a cruise missile at Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world.

No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night before the city's "liberation." Al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent, Tasir Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Alouni was in the Baghdad office yesterday to endure the U.S. Air Force's second attack on Al-Jazeera.

The French television channel France 3 had a crew in a neighbouring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. Their tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the tank gun's muzzle, the sound of a massive detonation, then pieces of paint-work falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.

In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded. It mortally wounded their Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, who was also filming the tanks, seriously wounded another members of the staff, Briton Paul Pasquale, and two other journalists, including Reuters' reporter Samia Nakhoul.

On the next floor, Telecinco's cameraman Jose Couso was also badly hurt and later died.

The U.S. responded with what all the evidence proves to be a straightforward lie. Gen. Buford Blount of the 3rd Infantry Division — whose tanks were on the bridge — announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased.

The general's statement, however, was untrue.

I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before the tank fires. And there were no snipers in the building.