US reporter killed in Syria ‘targeted by Assad regime’

Marie Colvin, a longtime war correspondent for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, was killed with French photographer Remi Ochlik in the besieged Syrian city of Homs in February 2012 while reporting on the Syrian conflict

Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times in November 10, 2010 in London, England, addressing a service commemorating journalists, cameramen and support staff who have fallen in the war zones and conflicts of the past decade. Colvin's family has filed a lawsuit in the US accusing the Syrian regime of targeting and killing her and the reporters she was working with in the city of Homs in February 2012. Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty ImagesShow less

Washington // The Syrian regime of Bashar Al Assad targeted and killed US reporter Marie Colvin in 2012 to stop her from covering government atrocities, according to her family who filed a lawsuit in a US court.

Colvin, a longtime war correspondent for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, was killed with French photographer Remi Ochlik in the besieged Syrian city of Homs in February 2012 while reporting on the Syrian conflict now in its sixth year.

The lawsuit, filed in Washington on Saturday, said the Syrian military intercepted Colvin’s communications and unleashed a barrage of rocket fire against a makeshift broadcast studio where Colvin and other reporters were living and working.

British photographer Paul Conroy, French reporter Edith Bouvier, and Syrian media defender Wael Al Omar were wounded in the same attack.

The lawsuit said the attack was part of a plan orchestrated at the highest levels of the Syrian government to silence local and international media “as part of its effort to crush political opposition”.

It was based on information from captured government documents and defectors, and names several Syrian officials, including Mr Al Assad’s brother Maher.

The night before the attack Colvin made audio broadcasts via satellite dish from Homs to CNN, BBC News, and Britain’s Channel 4 News.

“There are rockets, shells, tank shells, antiaircraft being fired in parallel lines into the city,” she told CNN, according to the documents. “The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

After a female informant confirmed Colvin’s presence at the site, Syrian artillery units “deliberately launched salvos of rockets and mortars directly at the improvised media centre”, the suit stated.

The journalists “were non-combatant civilians ... No armed rebels were present at or near the Media Center at the time of the attack”, the document said.

Homs is "a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire," Colvin wrote in her final piece for The Sunday Times, the paper where she had worked for 25 years.

“On the lips of everyone was the question: ‘Why have we been abandoned by the world?’”

* Agence France-Presse and Reuters