India’s Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist killed

Tributres paid to Danish Siddiqui (thequint.com)

By Gunjeet Sra

NEW DELHI: On July 16, news broke that India’s Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, 41-year-old Danish Siddiqui was killed in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar city in Afghanistan. At the time of his death, Siddiqui was on a reporting assignment for Reuters and embedded with the Afghan Special Forces. He was the chief photojournalist at the international news agency and had worked there for over a decade.

His last story was on the Afghan forces trying to extract a wounded policeman trapped amid Taliban near Kandahar. In a recent tweet he had mentioned how he sometimes tagged along with the Afghan Special Forces to cover the escalating situation in Afghanistan.

Danish Siddiqui

Siddiqui started out in Television journalism as a news correspondent but quit in order to pursue photojournalism. In 2018, he won the Pulitzer along with his colleague Adnan Abidi for his coverage of the violence faced by Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees. His pictures of mass funerals at the peak of India’s second wave went viral on social media recently. “While I enjoy covering news stories – from business to politics to sports – what I enjoy most is capturing the human face of a breaking story,” he had told Reuters.

In a conversation with India Today, the Taliban spokesperson, Mpoulana Yousaf Ahmadi denied killing the photojournalist, stating that he was with the enemy forces and if any journalist wanted to come to Afghanistan, they should speak to them. “We are already in touch with journalists in the country,” he said.

Siddiqui was buried in New Delhi amidst hundreds of people who gathered to bid him goodbye.