Julio Fuentes

Julio Fuentes Serrano (Madrid, Spain, December 11, 1954 - Afghanistan, November 19, 2001) was a Spanish war reporter assassinated while covering the 2001 War in Afghanistan.

Biography

He worked for the magazine Cambio 16 for seven years and in 1989 he joined the founding team of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. From then on he covered the major world conflicts of the late XX century, such as the Yugoslav Wars or the Gulf War.. In a rather atypical style, he wrote his chronicles from the perspective of the weakest and showed the conflicts through those who suffered the most.

On November 19, 2001, he was assassinated in an ambush against a convoy of journalists on the Pul-i-Estikam bridge, somewhere between Kabul and Jalalabad (Afghanistan), along with three other colleagues: the Italian correspondent for the daily Il Corriere della Sera, Maria Grazia Cutuli, Australian cameraman Harry Burton, who worked for the Reuters agency, and Afghan photographer Azizula Haidari.

On October 8, 2007, two days before the World Day Against the Death Penalty, Reza Khan, the murderer of Julio Fuentes, was executed in Kabul after being sentenced by a court in 2004. The Spanish government, collecting the wishes of the relatives of the dead journalists, had asked for that death sentence to be commuted.

Work

• In April 1997, he published his book entitled "Sarajevo Juicio Final".
• In 1998 he published the book "Human Resistance".
• In February 2000, she published in Plaza & Janes a work of fiction: "Rebellion", based on a possible European civil war at the end of the centuryXXI.

Acknowledgment

• 2002: winner of the City of ALCALÁ Award for Journalism "Manuel Azaña"