July 30, 2012
365 Lexime
NICOSIA (July 30, 2012): French freelance reporter Pierre Torres who was reported to have been wounded in Aleppo denied to AFP on Monday that he was hurt, saying he was safe and still operating from near the northern Syrian city.
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| © Vedat Xhymshiti |
“I am not wounded. I do not know this story came from,” Torres said in an email sent to AFP, one of the media networks for whom he files.
On Sunday, a Spanish freelance journalist said that Torres was shot in the shoulder when reporting on the fighting in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city which has been rocked by a government offensive against rebels since Saturday, and was evacuated to Turkey.
In his email Torres said he was still in Aleppo region.
“I’m fine,” he said.
An official at the media centre set up by rebels in Aleppo said it could have been a case of “mistaken identity”, without being able to clarify whether any foreign journalist was indeed hit in the shoulder.
Torres, 28, had been in Syria for the past two weeks and had visited the site of the massacre in the village of Treimsa in central Syria.
He reached Aleppo a few days ahead of Saturday’s launch by the Syrian army of an offensive to dislodge the rebels from the country’s commercial capital. – AFP
