The denunciation came a day after television reporters from Reuters and Spain's Telecinco were killed by a tank round fired into an upper floor of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, and an Al-Jazeera correspondent was killed in a separate missile attack on the Arabic news network's offices in downtown Baghdad.

The dead were identified as Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman with Reuters, Jose Couso from Spanish network Telecinco and Al-Jazeera's Tareq Ayub.

Egyptian government weekly Al-Mussawar said "the crushing and premeditated deaths of the journalists, victims of the coalition forces, is shown to be an "Operation Pull Out the Eyes" of the Arab and Western media so that they cannot witness the events Baghdad is about to experience."

The magazine said US forces had "begun the assault on Baghdad with the slaughter of journalists."

Al-Hayat daily said "it is a war crime to fire in a premeditated fashion against journalists on the battlefield. They fired on the soldiers of truth because they did not want witnesses to their crimes."

Government daily Al-Akhbar said "whoever fired knew what his deadly shots were aimed at. It was impossible to mistake the hotel, because millions of people knew that it was swarming with hundreds of journalists," the newspaper said.

"The invasion forces killed journalists to cover up their barbarous slaughter in Iraq."

That view was echoed by the opposition daily Al-Wafd, which said "the invaders liquidate journalists in order to impose a blackout on their butchery.

Salah Eddine Hafez, secretary general of the Cairo-based Federation of Arab Journalists, said the "bombardment and premeditated murder of journalists signifies that the US-British invasion forces are endeavoring to prevent the media from transmitting their stories on Iraq."

In Abu Dhabi, the Al-Ittihad daily said the killings Tuesday were aimed at "stifling the voice of truth."

Another Emirati daily, Al-Khaleej, accused the "forces of aggression" of "murdering liberty, truth and human rights."

For his part, Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa called "very serious" the targeting of journalists, who he said were fullfilling a "noble mission in transmitting the truth."

In Amman, the head of Jordan's press union led an angry march to denounce the death of Al-Jazeera's Ayub, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, that his father said was an attack on press freedom.

"They are attacking journalists to hide the truth," Naeem Ayub said, as he held up his son's one-year-old daughter Fatima, with tears running down his face.

Around 300 people, most of them journalists, took part in the solidarity march from Jordan's Al-Dustour newspaper down Press Road to the English-language Jordan Times where Ayub also worked.

"We call on the international community to intervene immediately to stop the aggression (on Iraq) and to protect journalists because what happened is a war crime," press union president Tareq Momani said in a statement.

"This is a war crime and we demand that those responsible be tried for it," Momani said.

In Damascus, dozens of Syrian, Arab and Western journalists held a sit-in Wednesday outside the Union of Syrian Journalists.

Syrian Information Minister Adnan Omran called on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to "denounce the crimes" and to "take the necessary steps against those responsible in accord with the Geneva conventions" on war.

The Pentagon said after the Tuesday incidents that it was saddened by all deaths among journalists but defense officials in Washington provided no explanation of why US forces targeted the hotel and premises used by Al-Jazeera.

But spokeswoman Victoria Clarke stressed that the Pentagon had repeatedly warned of the dangers of journalists not "embedded" with US forces remaining in Baghdad to cover the war.

"(The) war zone is a dangerous place; Baghdad in particular we believed would be a dangerous place. We continue to warn people, we continue to warn news organizations about the dangers," she said.

SPACE.WIRE