Background
Bahjat was born in Samarra. Her mother was a Shia and her father a Sunni.
Bahjat was born in Samarra. Her mother was a Shia and her father a Sunni.
Initially a reporter for Iraq"s state-controlled television under Saddam Hussein, Bahjat became a reporter for al-Jazeera and later a popular television correspondent for al-Arabiya following the United States invasion of Iraq. On 22 February 2006, Bahjat was abducted, raped, and murdered while covering a story in Samarra. Bahjat began her career reporting propaganda for Iraqi television during the rule of Saddam Hussein.
Following the United States invasion of Iraq, she began work at al-Jazeera.
Initially assigned to culture stories, she persisted in her reporting and was eventually assigned to political coverage of the Governing Council. She was the first to report from the scene about the 2003 looting of the National Museum of Iraq.
On another occasion, she was detained overnight by the United States military. She later persuaded her editors to send her to cover the 2004 fighting in Najaf, broadcasting live shots from rooftops even after the killing of another reporter by a United States army sniper.
She later became a television reporter for al-Arabiya.
Prior to her death, she was one of the best-known television journalists in the country. Bahjat persuaded her editors to let her travel to the scene. One of the attackers shouted, "We want the correspondent." Bahjat, her cameraman Khaled Mahmoud, and her technician Adnan Khairallah, were abducted.
The three were driven to a side street, where Mohsen and Abdallah shot Mahmoud and Khairallah.
Yasser raped and shot Bahjat. The bodies were found later that day.
On Saturday, 25 February, her funeral procession was attacked twice, first by gunmen who opened fire on mourners and later by a roadside bomb that targeted the funeral cortege as it returned from the cemetery. At least three security personnel were killed in the attacks on her funeral and four people were injured.
On 7 May 2006, the United Kingdom Sunday Times published an article by Hala Jaber, in which she describes watching a video of Bahjat being stripped of her clothing and beheaded.
The video was later proven to show the murder of a Nepalese man by The Army of Ansar al-Sunna in August 2004. On 28 May 2006 The Sunday Times retracted the story, saying it had been the victim of a hoax. He was sentenced to death by hanging in a trial criticized by Amnesty International as falling short of international standards, and was hanged on 16 November 2011.
Bahjat was also recognized posthumously by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism of Harvard University, which awarded her its Louis Lyons Award.
A fourth member of the team managed to escape.