2 foreign journalists killed in Syria

Two foreign journalists have been killed by Syrian government troops shelling the southern city of Homs.

In Paris, the government of France identified the two as Remi Ochlik, a French photographer, and Marie Colvin, an American reporter. Colvin was reported elsewhere to have been working for the Sunday Times in Britain.  

Omar Shaker, a Syrian activist, said the two journalists were killed Wednesday when several rockets hit the garden of a house used by activists and journalists in the besieged Homs neighbourhood of Baba Amr.

"That's enough now, the regime must go," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy after his government confirmed the journalists' deaths.

The CBC's Susan Ormiston, who reported from Syria in January, said Wednesday that Colvin "had snuck in … smuggled in through the Lebanese or Turkish  border, with escorts, Free Syrian Army escorts. She said in [a] report on Sunday that her house had already been shelled, and they must have moved to another accommodation which was hit by … shelling this morning."

"It's reported that as these journalists escaped this house, they were hit with rocket attacks, and that's how Marie Colvin was killed. The second journalist is a young French photographer who won a World Press Award this year for covering Libya. His name is Remi Ochlik, and he was there covering the crisis in Homs. By my count, we are now looking at four journalists who have been killed in the Homs area since January."

The government crackdown killed more than 5,400 people last year, the UN has estimated.

Homs has been one of the cities hit hardest. Activists say hundreds of people were killed this month in the city.

Colvin was interviewed  earlier this week in Homs by a British journalist about the nature of the conflict in the city.

"The Syrians are not allowing civilians to leave," she said. "Anyone who gets on the street, if they're not hit by a shell, they're sniped. There are snipers all around Baba Amr [neighbourhood] on the high buildings.

"I think the sickening thing is the complete merciless nature. They're hitting civilian buildings … and the scale of it is just shocking."

Three others wounded

A man in a video obtained by Reuters said there were still three wounded journalists where Colvin and Ochlik had been killed.

"This is the American journalist Marie Colvin, and this is French journalist Remi Ochlik," the man filmed in front of the house said, "and there are still three wounded journalists, among them a journalist with Le Figaro in critical condition. This journalist working in the Sunday Times and what you can see is the aftermath of the shelling and they are still here and the shelling is still continuing."

Syrian activists said at least two other Western journalists — French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the Sunday Times — were wounded in Wednesday's shelling, which claimed at least 13 lives.

Colvin was known for focusing on the plight of women and children in wartime. In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, she vividly recounted the death of an infant in Syria.

Ochlik, 29, was born in eastern France, his website said. He covered conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, elections in Haiti in 2010, and the uprisings in Egypt and Libya. His work has appeared in Le Monde, Paris Match, Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal. 

Colvin, from Oyster Bay, N.Y., was in her mid-50s, a Yale University graduate, and a veteran foreign correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times for the past two decades. She was instantly recognizable for an eye patch worn after being injured covering conflicts in Sri Lanka in 2001.

Colvin said she would not "hang up my flak jacket" even after the eye injury.

"So, was I stupid? Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night," she wrote in the Sunday Times after the attack. "Equally, I'd rather be in that middle ground between a desk job and getting shot, no offence to desk jobs.

Red Cross talks with Syria

In Geneva, the International Red Cross said it was holding talks with members of the opposition Syrian National Council. The ICRC called Tuesday for a daily two-hour halt to fighting in Syria so it can bring emergency aid to affected areas and evacuate the wounded and sick.

Head of ICRI operations for the Middle East, Beatrice Megevand-Roggo, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the ICRC had almost no contacts with opposition figures inside Syria.

The journalists' deaths came a day after a Syrian sniper shot dead Rami al-Sayyed, a prominent activist in Baba Amr who was famous for posting online videos, Shaker and the Local Coordination Committees activist group said.

On Jan. 11, award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in Homs. The 43-year-old correspondent for France-2 Television was the first Western journalist to die since the uprising began in March. Syrian authorities have said he was killed in a grenade attack carried out by opposition forces — a claim questioned by the French government, human rights groups and the Syrian opposition.

Last week, New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria after he snuck in to cover the conflict.