New York, April 15, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists mourns the deaths of two Al-Hurriya television journalists who were killed in suicide bombings while on their way to an assignment in Baghdad yesterday morning.

The station's Baghdad director, Nawrooz Mohamed, told CPJ today that producer Fadhil Hazem Fadhil and cameraman Ali Ibrahim Issa were killed en route to an event honoring the new president, Jalal Talabani. Mohamed told CPJ that the journalists were traveling in a car with a reporter and a driver when the bombs exploded outside the Interior Ministry. The reporter and driver were injured, he said.

Mohamed said that the journalists were not targets of the attacks, which The Associated Press said took the lives of at least 18 people.

Fadhil and Issa are the 38th and 39th journalists to be killed in Iraq since March 2003. Al-Hurriya, a station financed by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, has now lost three journalists in the war. Fadhil and Issa are both Iraqi; their deaths continue a 16-month trend in which the vast majority of journalist fatalities in Iraq have involved local people.