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Anton Hammerl’s family learn he was killed in April during attack when three other journalists were captured Anton Hammerl, an award-winning, British-based photographer who had been missing in Libya since early April, was killed during an incident in which three other journalists were captured, it has been revealed. Hammerl, who had joint South African and Austrian citizenship but lived in Surbiton, Surrey, had cut his teeth covering the township wars in South Africa. “On 5 April 2011, Anton was shot by Gaddafi’s forces in an extremely remote location in the Libyan desert,” Hammerl’s family announced on Thursday. “According to eyewitnesses, his injuries were such that he could not have survived without medical attention.” News of Hammerl’s death was given to his family by Clare Gillis and James Foley, two American reporters who were captured by forces loyal to the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in a remote area of eastern Libya and released on Thursday. They had been given suspended sentences of a year in prison for entering Libya illegally. Gillis and Foley said after their release that they, along with Hammerl and the Spanish photographer Manu Brab, arrived at a rebel-held frontline early on 5 April. Almost immediately, the rebels were put to flight by an attack by pro-Gaddafi forces, including two Libyan military trucks which the journalists could see driving towards them. “It all happened in a split second,” Foley told the Global Post . “We thought we were in the crossfire. But, eventually, we realised they were shooting at us. You could see and hear the bullets hitting the ground near us.” Hammerl, who was closest to the pro-Gaddafi forces, dived for cover but was shot in the abdomen. Hearing him cry out, Foley asked: “Are you OK? “No,” was Hammerl’s only reply. “I thought instinctively that we were all going to get killed, so I jumped up to surrender and screamed that we were journalists,” Foley said. He added that the three surviving journalists had struggled with how to communicate the news of Hammerl’s death to his family. “We knew collectively that if we spoke about Hammerl’s death while we were detained, then we would be in greater danger ourselves. But now that we’re free, it’s our moral imperative to tell the story of this great journalist and father,” he said. The news of Hammerl’s death brings to an end weeks of uncertainty for Hammerl’s wife and young family who had heard contradictory reports from the Libyan authorities about what had happened to him, being first informed he was safe and being held and later that there was no news of him. A statement put out by his family read: “From the moment Anton disappeared in Libya we have lived in hope as the Libyan officials assured us that they had Anton. It is intolerably cruel that Gaddafi loyalists have known Anton’s fate all along and chose to cover it up.” South Africa’s foreign minister claimed on Friday that Gaddafi fed South Africa misinformation about Hammerl. Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said Libya had still not come forward with the truth. “We kept getting reassurance and misinformation throughout,” Nkoana-Mashabane said. Referring to Gaddafi, she said the assurances came “at one stage from himself, yes, to say that they are all alive and that they are well”. Hammerl began his career in photojournalism covering the violence in South Africa and was mentored byKen Oesterbroek, one of the key figures in the Bang Bang Club – a small group of photographers which documented the conflicts. A family friend, Bronwyn Friedlander said: “Anton was a deeply moral and talented human being who did not deserve to die this way. But he died doing what he did best, telling stories with his photographs of the most vulnerable people.” Karel Prinsloo, of the Associated Press, who started his career in photography in South Africa at the same time as Hammerl, also paid tribute to him. “There are people like me who go straight for the news as it happens in front of us, but Anton was a much more thoughtful photographer,” he said. “He wanted to know why things were happening and what it meant to the people involved. He was a thinking man’s photographer.” The chairman of South Africa’s National Press Club, Yusuf Abramjee, told the South African Press Association that Hammerl would be remembered as “an outstanding photographer and a good human being”. News of Hammerl’s fate follows the deaths of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, who were killed in a mortar attack on 20 April in Misrata. Libya Muammar Gaddafi Africa Middle East South Africa Peter Beaumont guardian.co.uk