Steven Vincent's Final Days in Iraq by Dave Enders

laweekly: ..Vincent and Al-Khal were abducted on August 2. An Iraqi journalist who spoke with witnesses reported that the killers were driving an unmarked police car. A member of the Basra police confirmed this to another journalist, but the official statement from the police denies this.

"There are two stories in Basra right now," said an Iraqi correspondent in the city who asked that his name not be used. "One is that Steven was killed because there was a relationship between him and Nour [his 31 year old colleague]. The other is that he was killed for writing an article accusing the Sadr office of kidnappings."

Either could have been sufficient to sentence him to death. The day before Vincent's murder, an Iraqi woman working for an international NGO was shot on her way to work. Journalists have been attacked, threatened and harassed for writing the wrong things.

It would be sufficiently accurate to state the cause of death as "Basra," another unsolved homicide in a place where, as Vincent himself reported, the police are believed to be carrying out a number of extrajudicial killings. Read more