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Murdered At The Museum

By Libby Brooks

The Guardian
08 July , 2003

Sitting in the lounge of Baghdad's Palestine hotel last week, in the company of six veteran war correspondents, the 24-year-old novice reporter Richard Wild was understandably overawed. "He seemed quite quiet," recalls Jason Burke, the Observer's chief reporter, and one of the group. "But we talked about how things were going, and from the small number of contacts he had he seemed to be doing well. He didn't ask me for any help, which impressed me. He wasn't in the business of free-loading."
He last saw the young freelance on Friday morning, when he dropped off a tape for Burke to pass on to Channel 4 on his return to the UK. "He was very excited about a visit he'd made to a Palestinian refugee camp in the city. He'd filmed the whole thing himself, and he thought it was going to be his big break."

Wild was shot dead outside Baghdad's natural history museum on Saturday morning, as he stood on a traffic island trying to hire a taxi. His killer approached through a crowd of students, drew out a pistol and fired it into the base of his skull, before fleeing in the confusion that followed. It remains unclear whether Wild was targeted because he was a reporter, although he was not carrying his video camera at the time.

He is the 17th journalist to be killed in Iraq since the conflict began, and the first to die since US forces entered the capital in April, sparking a growing wave of guerrilla resistance. On Sunday his parents Robin and Daphne spoke of their vain attempts to stop him from making the trip. "The whole family tried their utmost to stop him going. But they seem to take least notice of their parents."

His mother said that she thought the venture foolhardy. It is certainly the case that freelancers, working alone, are always at a disadvantage without the backup and staff of an international news agency. And it remains uncertain whether Wild's inexperience rendered him especially vulnerable.

His Cambridge University graduation portrait shows a broad and handsome young man with blond curls and a steady gaze. Educated at Sedbergh boarding school and Sandhurst, and a keen rugby player and rower while at university, one might initially assume that Wild was of a particular mould, and dismiss his determination to report on the reconstruction of Iraq with no previous experience as the actions of someone with more privilege than sense. It was suggested in some reports that Wild had been unwise in his conduct around Baghdad, and that his newly cropped hairstyle and height may have led his attacker to mistake him for an American soldier.

But yesterday a more complex picture emerged as friends described an individual passionately committed to telling the story of Iraq beyond the notional cessation of hostilities, hungry for experience but as professional as he knew how to be, as seasoned a clubber as he was a sportsman, a young man who appreciated the privileges that he had been granted, but was not defined by them.

After completing an MPhil in medieval history at Jesus College, Cambridge, Wild worked briefly as a banker and as an art curator, before moving into journalism. His fascination with the power of the visual image to inform and evoke had begun long before - as a student he would wander around Cambridge photographing odd scenes, and he later won a local photography competition with his portrait of a Brixton street preacher. In television journalism he seemed to find a connection between this and his equal intellectual passion for getting to the heart of an issue.

James Bays, defence and foreign affairs correspondent for Channel Five, arranged a work experience placement at ITN for Wild, who was one of his younger sister's best friends. He shone and ITN took him on on a six-month contract. "You could tell this was someone a bit better and brighter than most. He had this very easy manner that seemed laid-back, but at the same time the moment you asked him something he knew all about it. This was a guy that stood out and you genuinely had a strong feeling that he would go all the way." Bays remembers a young man determined to do everything he could to learn more about the profession, begging spare cameras to experiment with at weekends, and devouring books of reportage.

Working as a picture researcher, it was Wild's job to log all the images that came into ITN throughout the war, and it was then, believes television producer Yasmin Hai, that he became locked into the story to the extent that he was determined to get to Iraq himself. Hai became friendly with Wild when they worked together on the Channel 4 programme The True Face of War, which looked beyond the Gameboy imagery of the conflict and addressed questions of censorship and appropriate reporting. Hai was alerted to Wild when she came across an article written by him in the Observer, in which he discussed his experience of processing war footage for ITN.

"When we met I was immediately struck by him. I thought he was amazing. He was ambitious but also very sensitive in the way that he dealt with projects. Even though he was new to the job, we were so struck by his professionalism that the office joke soon became that one day he would be running ITN," she says.

Wild told Hai about his plans to go to Iraq. "I've known many young journalists over the years who travel to dangerous foreign areas to seek out their fortunes, and I usually wonder what that person has to offer. But Richard was different. I could really imagine him having something to contribute, and I could sense he was burning to get out there. I think he got locked into the Iraq story and was hoping to fill the vacuum left by the bigger agencies as they pulled out.

"He was really positive and optimistic about the trip. He was so entrepreneurial that he'd already secured some commissions. I rarely come across someone like him who you felt would really add to the way we tell a story. He was so vivid. I know that people say this after a death. But I think a lot of people recognised early on that there was something very special about him."

If Wild was single-minded in his pursuit of his passion, it was not to the exclusion of all else. Prodigious as his talents may have been, his greatest gift seems to have been for friendship. "For us his overriding trait was his infectious calm," says Toby Fisher, Wild's flatmate and close friend. "He was a wonderful listener and had an uncanny ability to make others feel comfortable. He was the most popular of all our friends. He would welcome everyone and always see the best in them.

"But he wasn't so loved simply because he was kind. He was also supremely cool and very funny. He wasn't simply the posh public school boy who'd been to Sandhurst. He was the guy all the boys wanted to be and all the girls wanted to be with."

Fisher insists that, despite his friend's apparent indecision over career path, he had found his calling in journalism. "He was certain that he wanted to report on foreign conflicts. His aims were clear - he wanted to report from the Iraqi perspective. He was in touch with Iraqi exiles in London, and writers and reconstruction groups in Iraq. He passionately wanted to tell the story that the mainstream news companies were ignoring." Fisher also insists that Wild was pleased to be going out to the country independently, and that he wasn't unprepared. "He was a risk-taker," he adds, "and that was what made him such a compelling character."

His friend Jenny Kleeman recalls Wild as a student and notes his ability to span a wide range of friendship groups. "He was into everything. He took a lots of photographs, he was in plays, he wrote articles for the university paper. He went to college events, he went clubbing, he was always the last person standing at parties. He had an incredible energy about him."

"There was nothing that he couldn't do," concurs Christopher Hirst, headmaster of Sedbergh school in Cumbria, where Wild eventually became head boy. "He was a model pupil. The boys looked up to him, and he was on very good terms with the members of staff." Rosamond McKitterick, professor of medieval history at Jesus College, likewise remembers an able student with an original and inquiring mind. "It's a terrible waste. He was a lovely boy. He was so full of zest. He always wanted to get to the heart of things. And he was always great fun."

Jason Burke first encountered Wild a few months ago, when he approached the award-winning journalist for guidance about foreign reporting. "He wanted to know what I thought of him going to Baghdad to freelance. He was keen but not overly gung-ho." Burke recommended that he gain some experience on a local paper in the UK first before attempting to string from a foreign country. Burke himself arrived in Baghdad two weeks ago. "I was there for about three days when I get a phone call from the hotel lobby. It was Wild. The first thing I said to him was, 'So I see you didn't follow my advice then'."

"He wasn't a specialist by any means," says Burke, "but he was approaching it in as professional a manner as someone could with that level of experience. It's not half as dangerous as it sounds, and that day we met we were talking about how little we felt threatened as journalists. I had no sense that he was taking risks. There was nothing in his behaviour or demeanour that he was irresponsible."

Theo Youngstein bought his friend a pint at his leaving drink two weeks ago. "A lot of his friends didn't want him to go but he was following a dream. I think we all responded to the news with a mixture of disbelief and anger. I still haven't really got my head around the fact that he's dead.

"Only 12 days ago I was sitting in a pub on Portobello Road with him. He was nervous, but he wasn't the kind of guy to chicken out of something. He was more anxious about not having commissions than about his safety. He was an inspirational friend and he'll be really really missed."

As news of Wild's death filtered across his wide network of friends, groups came together to share memories of the most popular person they knew. Last night, a larger gathering was planned at his shared house in south-east London. But the last one standing at parties was elsewhere.