Pandemonium at the hotel reporters called home

Al-Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayoub was broadcasting live to the satellite station's 7am news bulletin yesterday when US aircraft fired two missiles at the bureau building, killing him and injuring a colleague. Two Iraqi staff are missing.

Taras Protsyuk was filming from Reuters' suite on the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel, where foreign journalists are based, when it was hit by a round from a US tank, killing him and Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman. Four other journalists were injured.

Within the space of five hours, seven journalists were killed and wounded from US army fire in Baghdad yesterday. American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi television, whose identity is spelled out in large blue letters on the roof.

All the journalists were killed and injured in daylight at sites known to the Pentagon as media sites.

The tank shell that hit the Palestine Hotel slammed into the 18-storey building at noon, shaking the tower and spewing rubble and dirt into hotel rooms at least six floors below.

Samia Nakhoul, the Gulf bureau chief of Reuters, was also injured, along with a British technician, Paul Pasquale, and an Iraqi photographer, Faleh Kheiber.

The attack brought pandemonium. Colleagues spattered with blood bundled the wounded into blankets, and took the lifts down. Others hung white sheets out of their windows.

The hotel lies on the east side of the Tigris, across from the official buildings and palaces of Saddam Hussein which have been the main target of the US ground invasions.

It was adopted by journalists a few days before the start of the war, after advice from the Pentagon to evacuate from the western side of the river.