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LONDON (AP) -- A private security company's search of the site in southern Iraq where a British TV journalist was killed has established that his team came under fire from both coalition and Iraqi forces, their company, ITN televison, said Thursday.
Two of Terry Lloyd's colleagues, cameraman Fred Nerac of France and Hussein Osman of Lebanon, are still missing. Another Independent Television News cameraman, Daniel Demostier, was wounded in the March 22 attack south of Basra.
ITN said the security firm AKE found the burned-out wrecks of Lloyd's car, along with two Iraqi vehicles -- a pickup truck and a car -- at the scene near Basra.
ITN believes the four journalists, traveling in two cars, were driving toward units of the U.S.-led coalition when they were flanked by vehicles carrying Iraqi soldiers and came under fire.
"AKE said their preliminary assessment, based on the trajectory and impact of the bullets, was that Terry Lloyd's vehicle had been hit a large number of times by firing from coalition forces, some of it from quite close range," ITS said in a statement.
"It had also been hit from the opposite direction by gunfire from Iraqi weapons. The evidence suggested this came from the direction of the Iraqi pickup truck," it added.
Stewart Purvis, ITN's chief executive and editor-in-chief, asked British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to press coalition commanders to produce a formal account of the incident.
"We're now clear that somebody in the American or British military knows what happened ... but they have not come forward," Purvis said.
"We need details of the incident and the immediate aftermath to understand what happened to Fred and Hussein and to ease the anguish of their desperate families."
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
