Tareq Ayyoub

Tareq Ayyoub, the Al-Jazeera reporter who was killed yesterday morning when an American missile struck the independent Arab TV station's Baghdad office, was a fiercely determined journalist with a strong commitment to justice.

A Palestinian who was born in Kuwait in 1968 and got an MA in English literature from Calicut University in the Indian state of Kerala, he was part of the huge Palestinian diaspora which has done so much to bring development throughout the Middle East.

For the last five years he had worked as a staff reporter for Amman's English-language paper, the Jordan Times, concentrating on domestic politics and Jordan's relations with the Arab world. He also worked part-time as a translater for Western journalists and as a reporter for Al Jazeera.

He had good contacts with the large Iraqi exile community in Jordan and I could see he was clearly angry over the looming US attack on Iraq when he took me in early March to the home of an Iraqi artist who painted scenes of doom and destruction from earlier wars. Like most exiles, the artist opposed Saddam but thought war was too high a price for Iraqis to pay to topple him.

Tareq did not initially intend to go to Baghdad but as the war dragged on he felt he had to be there. Al Jazeera agreed to let him work in Baghdad. "He rang me last Friday to ask me if he could go", Jennifer Hamarneh, the editor of the Jordan Times, said yesterday. "I can't stop you, I told him, but how does your wife feel? 'She's sitting next to me', he replied". "He was one of our stars, very driven and hardworking", she added.

Ironically, Tareq's first report for the paper he wanted to continue serving alongside his reporting for Al Jazeera, appeared in yesterday morning's edition as he was dying from multiple shrapnel wounds. It was a short factual dispatch of 400 words but he chose to include the point, ignored in many other newspapers' longer reports, that many Iraqi families were fleeing from Baghdad to seek shelter from coalition shelling of civilian areas. He also reported that an Al Jazeera camera assistant was shot at with small arms by US forces on Sunday, causing severe damage to his vehicle.

Tareq's wife taught English literature at the University of Jordan. The couple suffered a heavy loss last year when one of their twin girls, their first children, died soon after birth.

One of Tareq's Al Jazeera's colleagues, Zuhair al-Iraqi, a cameraman, received shrapnel in his neck in yesterday's US attack, but a colleague later said his injuries were not life-threatening.