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"I want you to know that it is being looked at with all the intensity we can give to the case. I will be back in touch with you as soon as we find out any information whatsoever," Powell said.
Fabienne Nerac, the wife of missing ITN cameraman Fred Nerac, accused US forces of shooting at her husband's car, and of hiding the facts behind his disappearance.
She made an impassioned appeal for help to Powell, in an unexpected intervention at a NATO press conference in Brussels.
Veteran ITN war reporter Terry Lloyd was killed when the car in which he was travelling with Nerac came under fire in the desert near Basra in southern Iraq on March 22, two days after the war started.
While Lloyd's body was located at a Basra hospital, Nerac -- a French national -- and Lebanese driver-translator Hussein Osman remain missing. A second cameraman, Daniel Demoustier, survived.
ITN said an investigation it had commissioned had found that Lloyd's vehicle had been hit by both coalition and Iraqi fire.
The cameraman's wife said there was still a chance her husband was alive.
"I'm hopeful. We haven't seen his body, so I'm hopeful," she said after the press conference.
Powell said he had been given an e-mail on Wednesday containing information that may help the US military locate Nerac and that he had sent it on to Iraq.
"For the last almost 18 hours now they have been hard at work trying to find out whatever they could about your husband."
Nerac's wife begged him to check further and to contact her if he had any information.
"Yes maam. I am very sensitive to this," Powell replied.
"I know... I understand your feelings and as soon as we heard of it yesterday then my planner immediately contacted the authorities in the region and asked them to look into it."
"But I give you my personal promise that we are working to find out what happened," the secretary of state said.
Speaking later, Fabienne Nerac said that Powell's response had been positive because he had given her his personal promise, but she was convinced that US troops had been firing at the time her husband disappeared.
"They were surrounded by Iraqi forces and American soldiers and the Americans fired on the vehicle without seeing, or without wanting to see the 'TV' and 'Press' signs," she said.
It was understood that Nerac gained access to the high security press conference after her case was taken up by the international federation of journalists, who had spoken to the US delegation about addressing Powell.
ITN produces newscasts for ITV, Britain's main commercial television channel, as well as the smaller Channel 4 and five networks.
In a letter to US President George W. Bush, Fabienne Nerac had earlier said: "I do not know whether my husband is dead or alive. For 12 terrible days my children and I have been through a living hell, desperate for information on what happened to him.
"I believe you may know the answer to so many of our questions, yet you will not tell us anything," the letter added.
"I am writing to beg you, and to appeal to your humanity, to break your silence and tell me what happened that day."
ITN, meanwhile, said it had asked British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to press coalition commanders to produce a formal account of events.
The network commissioned private security firm AKE to carry out a search of the scene of the incident, and the firm had found the burned-out wrecks of Lloyd's car and two Iraqi vehicles.
AKE said in a preliminary report that Lloyd's vehicle had been hit by both coalition and Iraqi fire, according to ITN.
The security firm also said that Nerac and Hussein Osman could still be somewhere in Basra, possibly wounded, in hiding or captive.
The alternative was that they were dead and had been buried along with Iraqi casualties.
On Wednesday, the BBC said one of its cameramen, Kaveh Golestan, an Iranian, was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, becoming the third journalist working for British media to be killed since the war began.
SPACE.WIRE |