Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria Shelling

Among the scores of people that activist groups reported killed by rockets and bombs through the day, two were Western journalists, the veteran American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who had been working for The Sunday Times of London, and a young French photographer, Rémi Ochlik. The two had been working in a makeshift media center that was destroyed in the assault, raising suspicions that Syrian security forces might have identified its location by tracing satellite signals. Experts say that such tracking is possible with sophisticated equipment.

Activists, civilian journalists and foreign correspondents who have snuck into Syria have infuriated the authorities and foiled the government’s efforts to control the coverage of clashes, which have claimed thousands of Syrian lives in the last year and which Mr. Assad portrays as caused by an armed insurgency.

Quoting a witness reached from neighboring Jordan, Reuters said the two journalists died after shells hit the house in which they were staying and a rocket hit them when they were trying to escape.

Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation and the owner of The Sunday Times, saluted Ms. Colvin as “one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation,” and said in an e-mail to the paper’s staff she “was a victim of a shell attack by the Syrian Army on a building that had been turned into an impromptu press center by the rebels.

“Our photographer, Paul Conroy, was with her and is believed to have been injured,” he said. “We are doing all we can in the face of shelling and sniper fire to get him to safety and to recover Marie’s body.”

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain paid tribute to Ms. Colvin on Wednesday, saying her death was a reminder of the perils facing reporters covering “dreadful events” in Syria. A longtime war correspondent, she lost an eye covering the Sri Lankan civil war and wore a distinctive black eye patch.

Video posted online showed what appeared to be the foreign journalists’ bodies lying face down in rubble. Three other Western journalists were injured in the attack, activists said. The French prime minister, François Fillon, indentified one as Edith Bouvier, a 31-year-old freelancer for the daily newspaper, Le Figaro. Video on YouTube showed her and Mr. Conroy, an Irish freelance photographer who had been working with Ms. Colvin, lying in what appeared to be a makeshift clinic with bandages on their legs.

Reuters quoted a member of the advocacy group Avaaz as saying that Ms. Bouvier’s condition was precarious. “There is a high risk she will bleed to death without urgent medical attention,” the advocate said. “We are desperately trying to get her out, doing all we can in extremely perilous circumstances.”

A day earlier, a well-known video blogger in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baba Amr, Rami el-Sayed, was killed. Other citizen journalists in Homs have been killed recently in what activists interpret as part of a deliberate campaign to choke off news of the opposition.

The Syrian authorities rarely grant visas for foreign reporters to enter the country and seek to control those who are given permission to do so. Those controls have combined to make the Syrian revolt difficult to observe firsthand and reporters who do so run great risks of being caught in fighting, often in isolated pockets of rebel resistance.

Last week, Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria on Thursday after spending nearly a week reporting covertly in the northern area of Idlib, near the Turkish border.

On Wednesday, another activist group said that 27 young men had been killed the day before in that area. Reuters cited a statement from the Syrian Network for Human Rights as saying that most of the men, who were civilians, had been shot in the head or chest on Tuesday in several villages: Idita, Iblin and Balshon in Idlib province near the border with Turkey.

“Military forces chased civilians in these villages, arrested them and killed them without hesitation,” Reuters quoted the organization said in a statement. “They concentrated on male youths and whoever did not manage to escape was to be killed.”