© Twitter/Hamid Farajollahi
Reporter and mother of two, Serena Shim was killed in Turkey - "the largest prison for journalists". She had expressed fears for her own safety
Exactly a year ago - on October 19th, 2014 - the journalist Serena Shim was killed after reporting from Kobani in Syria as a war correspondent. Her death was almost certainly the work of the Turkish intelligence community. It's a rather remarkable, and depressing, 'coincidence' that just as I was sitting down to put together a post in tribute to her, I've just come across news that another journalist and activist, Jacky Sutton, has just been found dead in Turkey - exactly a year to the date of Serena Shim's suspicious death.
Former BBC journalist, Jacky Sutton (aged 50) is reported to have been found dead in a toilet in Istanbul's main airport. The British journalist (pictured below), who had been working as Iraq director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), was in Turkey en route to Irbil in Northern Iraq.
Turkish sources have allegedly suggested that she has killed herself after missing a flight connection - a rather poor, even insulting, suggestion, which colleagues of Ms Sutton are dismissing. In her role as acting Iraq head of the (London-based)
IWPR, Jackie Sutton's role has been to support local journalism in countries affected by war and crisis. As
The Guardian notes, the organisation's previous Iraq director, Ammar Al Shahbander, was killed in a car-bomb in Baghdad on 2nd May this year. It is claimed the British woman's body has been found hanging from boot laces.
Sudipto Mukerjee, a director with the UN Development Programme, has said,
according to
The Independent; "Very difficult to believe that my colleague in Iraq, staffer and seasoned traveller Jacky Sutton committed suicide." Ms Sutton had, among other things, previously worked for the BBC World Service, reporting from Africa, the Middle East and London.
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