BAGHDAD: Journalists in Iraq are facing double danger as tense US troops, nervous after weeks of attacks from Iraqi militants and looters, accidentally place reporters and photographers in their gunsights.

“If they can’t tell the difference between a rocket-propelled grenade and a camera from 40 yards, we’re all screwed,” said a South African journalist here.

Her comments came after a Palestinian cameraman for Reuters television was shot dead on Sunday by a member of a US tank crew as he recorded footage outside a prison near Baghdad.

“It’s outrageous. When you’re close to the Americans you would expect to be safe,” added the South African reporter.

The death of cameraman Mazen Dana, for which the US army has offered no explanation beyond saying it is under investigation, brought to 17 number of journalists to have died or disappeared since the Iraq invasion began in March.

Most were killed either in attacks or accidents, but Dana was also the fourth journalist to be killed by the American troops that ousted Saddam Hussein in April.

A US military investigation last Tuesday exonerated the crew of a US tank that fired on a Baghdad hotel filled with foreign journalists on April 8, killing two television cameramen, one of them also with Reuters.

But the inquiry has since been dismissed as a pack of lies by a media watchdog and by families of the victims.

A correspondent for Qatar-based satellite channel Al-Jazeera was also killed by US troops in a separate incident on April 8 in the Iraqi capital.

“As an Iraqi journalist I feel under greater threat,” Ahmed Sammawy, a colleague working for the same station, said Monday. “The military seems unable to discriminate between peaceful and non-peaceful Iraqis.”

“They (US troops) are afraid, they are totally panicked, but they know they are untouchable: if they have any doubt, they shoot,” said an Iraqi cameraman, who declined to give his name.

Media rights groups on Monday called for a full and transparent investigation into the death of the Reuters journalist on Sunday, saying the incident has raised disturbing questions over the coalition’s stance towards journalists in Iraq.

Reporters in Iraq are also targeted by thieves because they often move about with valuable cameras or computers and, in an Iraq where post-Saddam banking is still in its infancy, large amounts of cash.

It can also be dangerous to be heard speaking English. One Iraqi journalist working for AFP in the southern city of Basra was beaten recently because rioters heard him phoning in a report of the incident.

The attackers apparently thought he was reporting to the British army that controls the city.

The top US military spokesman in Iraq, Colonel Guy Shields, on Monday described the killing of the Reuters journalist as a “terrible tragedy” and offered his condolences to Dana’s family and colleagues.

“When a journalist gets killed I take it very personally,” he said. —AFP