US forces in Baghdad yesterday killed three journalists and wounded four others in strikes on the al Jazeera television station and the Palestine Hotel, where the foreign press in Baghdad are living.
A US general acknowledged that an Abrams tank fired the shell that killed Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters television, and Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman for Tele 5.
Mr Protsjuk was the father of a nine-year-old boy. Mr Couso died after having his leg amputated.
The US claimed a sniper was operating in the hotel. None of the approximately 250 journalists living in the Palestine heard shots fired at any time from the hotel.
The same tank shell wounded the Reuters bureau's British co-ordinator, Paul Pasquale, a Reuters correspondent, Samia Nakhoul, who is married to the Financial Times journalist, David Gardner, and an Iraqi employee of Reuters named Faleh.
Several hours earlier a US aircraft fired a rocket at the roof of al Jazeera's building, killing Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian correspondent for the Qatari network.
He was recording an eyewitness account of the fighting between Iraqi and US forces on the west bank of the Tigris river.
Al Jazeera's Iraqi cameraman was wounded. The network, the most watched in the Arab world, said it had received assurances from the US government that it would not be bombed. After the rocket attack, an Abrams tank fired a shell at the al Jazeera building, trapping 18 people in the basement.
The deaths of Mr Protsyuk, Mr Couso and Mr Ayoub were the first fatalities among journalists reporting the Iraqi side of this conflict. Six others have been killed in autonomous Kurdistan and while advancing with US and British invasion forces from Kuwait.
The US admitted it fired the tank shell at the Palestine Hotel when irrefutable proof was provided.
Hervé de Ploëg, a cameraman for France 3 television, filmed the two Abrams tanks on the Jumhurriya Bridge for several minutes before he saw the turret on the left-hand tank turn and the gun barrel aim directly at the hotel.
There are no gunshots on several minutes of videotape preceding the tank firing. Cameramen are forbidden by the Iraqis from filming from hotel balconies, but the rule is widely disobeyed. But no one believed the US would attack a hotel that is known to be headquarters for foreign media. Any sense of safety vanished with their deaths.
On Mr de Ploëg's tape, an orange flame comes out of the gun barrel as the tank fires. It takes exactly two seconds for the shell to travel the 600 metres between the bridge and the hotel.
The image shakes violently as the building is hit, followed by the sound of plaster and cement falling from the 14th and 15th floors.
It is conceivable that a tank gunner stoked up on fear may have mistaken a television camera for a sniper's lens.
Some correspondents interpreted the attacks on the hotel and al Jazeera as a deliberate attempt to silence reporting of the Iraqi side of the war.
US and British officials repeatedly warned foreign correspondents to leave Baghdad before the war, and Mr David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary, last week accused journalists here of reporting "from behind enemy lines".
The US several times attacked the Information Ministry, where foreign journalists were forced by the Iraqis to work, with rockets and cruise missiles.
Al Jazeera has been criticised by both the US and Iraqi governments, a sign of the quality of its reporting. The US bombed its Kabul office in 2001, leading to speculation that the network was being "punished" for broadcasting videotapes of Osama bin Laden.
Al Jazeera has maintained an office in Baghdad since 1997 and has contracts with the BBC, CNN, ABC News and other international networks to provide footage.
A source at al Jazeera said the network gave the map co-ordinates of its building to the Pentagon two months ago and was promised it would not be bombed, despite its physical proximity to Iraqi government buildings on the west bank of the Tigris.
Those assurances were renewed by a US State Department official in Qatar on Monday, the source said. The aircraft that fired the rocket that killed Mr Ayoub dived so low that a survivor of the attack said he thought it was going to land on the roof.
Yesterday morning the US bombed virtually everything along the west bank of the Tigris between Saddam Hussein's presidential complex and the Jumhurriya Bridge, before US troops and the two Abrams tanks made a half-mile advance on to the bridge, towards the east of the city.
I was returning from a journey around Baghdad when I heard a detonation, as I drove through the underpass on Sa'adoun Street.
I saw a white cloud in front of the hotel and passersby standing and pointing at the hole on the side of the 15th floor.
Journalists were rushing out of the building, which was badly jolted by the explosion.
The Iraqi Information Minister, Mr Mohamed Said al-Sahaf, was holding forth on the driveway in front of the hotel, threatening to "burn the Americans in their tanks, flatten and destroy them".
At that moment, journalists came rushing out of the hotel, carrying their wounded colleagues, who were put into cars and driven to hospital, where Mr Protsyuk died within an hour, Mr Couso in early evening.