Waldemar Milewicz
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Waldemar Milewicz (August 20, 1956 – May 7, 2004) was a Polish journalist and war correspondent who was killed in Iraq.
Milewicz's undergraduate studies were in psychology. In 1981 he started his career in the Polish public television, TVP. Since 1991 he was working in the news division. He travelled all over the world to most areas of armed conflict to report for TV and make documentaries, among others Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Somalia, Ethiopia. Thanks to his excellent documentaries This is a Strange World he became one of the best-known reporters in Poland.
On May 7th 2004 the car he was returning from Baghdad to the Polish base Camp Babilon. It is believed that their car was followed by a group of Iraqi assassins in another car. Milewicz's car was clearly marked with a 'press' sticker and despite that when the attackers caught up with it they opened machine gunfire. Milewicz was hit first and died instantly and another member of his crew, a Polish-Algerian Mounir Bouamrane, was killed on the site when he had left the vehicle. The crew cameraman, who was in the car, a Polish citizen Jerzy Ernst, was wounded in the arm by gunfire.
Milewicz got a lot of awards and prizes for his work, among the most important are: SAIS-Ciba Prize for Excellence in Journalism by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1995 for his work in Chechnya and in 2001 the Polish "Reporter of the Year Award".
