Tributes have been paid to the photographer and freelance journalist Paul Conroy, who has died from a heart attack. He was 61 and had just returned from Cuba, where he had been reporting on the aftermath of the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States.
In 2012 Paul was critically injured in the attack that killed his Sunday Times colleague Marie Colvin and French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik during the siege of Homs. Smuggled out of Syria alongside fellow journalist Édith Bouvier, he endured five months in hospital in the UK, undergoing 23 operations on his leg as well as surgery to his abdomen and back.
Paul documented his ordeal in ‘Under the Wire’, a searing account of survival, journalism and the moral imperative to bear witness. In 2018, the book was made into a movie, starring Jamie Dornan as Paul. ‘A Private War’ introduced a wider audience to the realities freelance journalists face in war zones.
Alan Conroy has led the tributes to his brother, telling how Paul found deep satisfaction in exposing injustice: “I think he’ll be proud to say, ‘I’ve done my bit, my conscience is clear. I actually did something about it’.” RPT Trustee and BBC presenter, Clive Myrie, described him as “a wonderful photojournalist and a wonderful human being… a decent, principled and kind man” while Channel 4 News International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum, said: “All of us who knew and loved him are devastated.”
Paul had covered conflicts in Libya, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as Syria. Most recently he had been based in Ukraine. Two decades after receiving a hostile environment training bursary from the Rory Peck Trust, Paul was training Ukrainian journalists in battlefield first aid — passing on the skills that had once helped save his own life — while continuing to document the war’s toll on civilians.
The Executive Director of the Rory Peck Trust, Jon Williams, said “Even at the end of his life Paul was doing what he had always done: travelling towards the story not away from it. For those of us who believe journalism matters, his life stands as a reminder of what that belief looks like in practice. He showed up. He stayed. He bore witness.”
Paul Conroy is survived by his wife, three sons and grandchildren.