Two CBS journalists are missing in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the network said in a brief statement on Monday.
“All efforts are under way to find them,” said the statement, which also asked other news organizations not to “speculate on the identity of those involved.”

But in recent years, Basra has been the venue of attacks on Iraqi and Western journalists, and on Monday a semi-independent Iraqi news network, Voices of Iraq, citing Basra police officials, reported on its Web site that a British journalist, apparently a photographer, and his Iraqi interpreter were abducted by gunmen from their hotel, the Qasr al-Sultan, in Basra. CBS declined to comment on those details.

The Iraqi police said that the abductees were a reporter and a translator, and that they were taken away in what appeared to be official police vehicles.

After the 2003 invasion, the Qasr al-Sultan was commonly used by Western journalists. But after two killings in 2005, journalists have been much more cautious about working on the streets of Basra or staying in its hotels, preferring to stay in compounds guarded by American or British forces near the airport.

In July of that year, an American freelance journalist, Stephen Vincent, was killed outside another Basra hotel, and in September, an Iraqi journalist working for The New York Times, Fakher Haider, was also killed after being taken from his home in Basra. In both cases, official Iraqi security forces were implicated, though no one has ever been officially accused of the killings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under News. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.