Reuters employs several thousand journalists. In May 2000, Kurt Schork, an American reporter, was killed in an ambush while on assignment in Sierra Leone. In April and August 2003, news cameramen Taras Protsyuk and Mazen Dana were killed in separate incidents by U.S. troops in Iraq. In July 2007, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed when they were fired upon by a U.S. military Apache helicopter in Baghdad[5] after having been mistakenly identified as carrying weapons.[6] During 2004, cameramen Adlan Khasanov in Chechnya and Dhia Najim in Iraq were also killed. In April 2008, cameraman Fadel Shana was killed in the Gaza Strip after being hit by an Israeli tank using flechettes.[7]
The first Reuters journalist to be taken hostage in action was Anthony Grey. Detained while covering China's Cultural Revolution in Peking in the late 1960s, it was said to be in response to the jailing of several Chinese journalists by the colonial British government of Hong Kong.[8] He was considered to be the first political hostage of the modern age and was released after almost two years of solitary confinement. Awarded an OBE by the British Government in recognition of this, he went on to become a best-selling author