Vietnam War Photographer Killed in Hanoi

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

Wednesday November 15 12:40 AM ET (via Yahoo)

Vietnam War Photographer Killed 

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - A well-known Vietnam War photographer was killed at
his downtown office in Hanoi, police said Wednesday.

Nguyen Trong Thanh, 58, was found dead Tuesday. Authorities arrested Vu
Truong Giang, 27, when he returned to Thanh's office hours
later, allegedly to make sure the photographer was dead, police said.

Giang is an employee of the Ministry of Planning and Investment. Thanh Nien
(Young People) newspaper reported that Giang told police
that he and his fiancee went to Thanh's office to demand that he return
photos he had taken of the fiancee. The two men began arguing
angrily, the paper said.

`Thanh slapped me in the face and bit my fingers. I was too angry and could
not control myself. I strangled him and tied his mouth with a
piece of cloth so that he could not shout,'' Giang was quoted by Thanh Nien
as telling police.

Police are still investigating the motives of the killing, the paper said.

Editors of Vietnam Pictorials, a publication of the Vietnam News Agency
where Thanh worked, declined to comment.

Thanh spent five years working along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the legendary
network of mostly dirt paths that snaked through mountains and
jungles, giving communist guerrillas a route to ferry weapons and troops to
the south.

When he headed into the field 1968, Thanh carried three bulky cameras, 400
rolls of film and processing chemicals. He stored his negatives
in a pouch that he wore like a belt, even when he slept.

`The Americans sometimes bombed 24 hours a day. You never knew when you
would have to run away. Many photographers lost their film
and cameras this way,'' Thanh told The Associated Press in an interview in
April.

Thanh has published two books of his war photos, one in the United States
and the other in Japan. Ironically, his favorite - and the only war
picture to adorn his studio - was never published during the conflict.

The black-and-white image shows a kneeling North Vietnamese soldier sharing
his canteen with a dazed South Vietnamese fighter
wounded in a 1971 battle. Thanh's North Vietnamese editors wouldn't touch
the picture, believing it could `weaken the fighting spirit'' by
humanizing the conflict.

When it finally debuted at a 1991 exhibit in the United States, young people
accepted it as genuine, but many older Americans rejected it
as a setup, he said.

`There's no way I could have fabricated this photo,'' he said in the
interview. `But that's what some people want to believe.'' 

 
=================================================================
  NY Transfer News Collective   *   A Service of Blythe Systems 
           Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us          
              339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012             
  http://www.blythe.org                  e-mail: nyt@blythe.org 
=================================================================
 
nytas-11.15.00-02:32:20-1979