A sombre day indeed. On this date, 15 years ago, Farzad Bazoft, an Observer journalist who reported from Iraq, was executed by Saddam Hussein. We asked Foreign Affairs Editor Peter Beaumont, who worked with Farzad, to write a tribute for the blog:
Fifteen years.
We have grown old and Farzad remains as we last saw him, beaten, confused and tearful. His picture and the plaque commemorating his death at the hands of Saddam Hussein, has travelled with us through all the paper's moves. Farzad Bazoft Observer Reporter: Killed in Baghdad by the government of Saddam Hussein; He died for his profession.
I remember that morning, 15 years ago, when the announcement came that despite the protests and the diplomatic pressure, Iraq had murdered him. I had been asleep and I was wakened to the news. I remember the hot tears, the phone calls, the sense of helplessness and abandonment. A lot of us grew up that day.
We had stood outside the embassy of Iraq to demonstrate against his arrest for taking soil samples outside a chemical plant where there had been a fire. Farzad suspected that chemical weapons were being made inside. It was a risk too far. Despite being an Iranian exile, none of us believed he would be killed. How innocent that seems now.
Now, two wars against Iraq have come and gone and Saddam's brutal regime has passed into history. A few days after the regime fell I was in Baghdad and went to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat - the secret police - to search for any evidence of what had happened to Farzad just as once, with a colleague, I searched Farzad's London flat to disprove the claims being bandied around by some of newspapers that Farzad was a spy.
But there was nothing to find except evidence of how widespread and universal torture had been in that place. A US soldier who had liberated the building told me what they had found inside: equipment for delivering electric shocks, for delivering beatings. I told him about Farzad and he let me in to wander around a place whose evil had disappeared at the moment that those who had run it had fled.
A friend said to me once: how quickly the water closes above our heads. How quickly we disappear. Except Farzad will not disappear. He is our history. He is a reminder of both our task and the price that journalists are sometimes made to pay.
Farzad Bazoft. Photograph: Jane Bown
Two years ago we tracked down the interrogator who admitted that Farzad was innocent.
