Steven Vincent

Slaying of US writer in Basra is investigated
by Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe, August 4, 2005

American author and freelance journalist Steven Vincent, who was kidnapped and murdered late Tuesday in Basra, was an outspoken critic of the police force in the southern city and of the rise in what he called ''Islamo-fascism." [...]

His death appeared to mark the first targeted killing of a Western journalist in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003. Since then, three other American journalists have died in Iraq, including veteran Boston Globe reporter Elizabeth Neuffer, who was killed in a car accident. Police spokesman Abdulkerim Zaidi and witnesses said that a group of men in an unmarked pickup truck abducted Vincent and Khal after 6 p.m. Tuesday when they were leaving a money changer's office near the Merbid Hotel, where Vincent had been staying.

The witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said four men carried out the kidnapping. Vincent resisted, and one of his shoes remained in the street after the pair were thrown in the truck and taken away. [...]

Vincent was openly scornful of Basra's police and government; he had written about the high rate of unsolved murders, public corruption, and death squads that targeted secular Iraqis in articles for the Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Harper's, and for his Internet blog, also called ''In the Red Zone." The blog entries took the form of letters to his wife, Lisa, in New York City.

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