War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Arnett, aged 91, according to US media.
Arnett won the 1966 International Journalism Award for his coverage of the Vietnam War by the Associated Press (AP). However, he was also known for his work at CNN.
His career spanned decades and covered several conflicts in countries such as Iraq, Vietnam and El Salvador.
He was born in New Zealand, and died Wednesday, with family and friends by his side in California, his son told reporters. The journalist was in a nursing home, as he was suffering from prostate cancer.
According to , Arnett first worked for the AP as a Vietnam correspondent from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975, often accompanying military forces on their missions.
“He fell to the ground, at my feet”
In a 2013 speech, he recalled the moment he saw a soldier being shot in Vietnam as he paused to read a map.
“As the colonel was looking at him, I heard four loud shots, as the bullets went through the map and hit him in the chest, inches from my face,” Arnett had described, “he fell to the ground, at my feet.”
He was one of the few journalists left in Baghdad, according to the AP, with one of his first broadcasts from the city interrupted by the sounds of rockets and air raid sirens.
“There was an explosion right next to me, maybe you heard it,” he once reported live on air.
During his stay in Iraq, he interviewed then-president Saddam Hussein. Writing about his experience in the Roanoke Times, Arnett said he had decided to be “as hard on my questions as the situation would allow.”
He continued: “I wasn’t daunted by the prospect of meeting the man many called ‘The Butcher of Baghdad.’ I thought it couldn’t do any worse to me than the constant bombing of Baghdad was threatening to do to me.”
In 1997, Arnett became the first journalist to interview Osama bin Laden at a secret hideout in Afghanistan, a few years before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
According to several US media reports, when asked about his plans, bin Laden told Arnett, “You’ll see them and hear them in the media, God willing.”
Arnett later worked for NBC and was fired by the broadcaster after an interview on Iraqi state television in which he was found to be critical of US military strategy.
A few hours later he was hired by the Daily Mirror newspaper and said he was “in shock” at his sacking.
“I am reporting the truth about what is happening here in Baghdad and I will not apologize for it,” he wrote in the British newspaper.
Born in 1934 in Riverton, New Zealand, Arnett later acquired American citizenship and lived in southern California as of 2014.
Edith Lederer, a former colleague who still works at the AP, told the agency: “Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation – fearless, courageous and an extraordinary writer and storyteller. His press and television reporting will remain a legacy for future generations of aspiring journalists and historians.”
