A FRENCH REPORTER wounded in a rocket attack last week in Syria that killed two other journalists is receiving treatment in Beirut hospital and is expected to fly home later Friday, a senior Lebanese security official said.
The official said Edith Bouvier was smuggled across the Lebanese-Syrian border into the northeastern part of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and was then taken to the Hotel-Dieu de France hospital in Beirut, where she arrived shortly after midnight Thursday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the convoy of ambulances and police vehicles drove through the mountains of Lebanon amid a heavy snow storm to bring Bouvier to Beirut.
Bouvier was wounded in a rocket attack during the Syrian troops’ onslaught on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Baba Amr in the restive central city of Homs. The attack also killed two Western journalists — American reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik — and wounded a British photographer, Paul Conroy.
French President Sarkozy announced the news, saying late Thursday that Bouvier and another wounded journalist William Daniels of France had been successfully smuggled into Lebanon.
“I had (Bouvier) on the phone. She is with her colleague, outside Syria,” Sarkozy said during an impromptu news briefing in Brussels. “She has suffered a lot, but she will give the details herself.”
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe expressed his “immense joy” that the two were safe in Lebanon.
“They were taken in by the French Embassy in Beirut and everything is being done to ensure their medical care and their repatriation as soon as possible,” Juppe said.
The Lebanese official said a French plane is to take Bouvier home later Friday. He did not elaborate on Daniels’ plans.
On Thursday, videos released by activists in Syria said Colvin and Ochlik were buried in Baba Amr.
The videos and Bouvier’s and Daniels’ escape were steps toward the end of the ordeal of the six journalists who had sneaked into Syria illegally to report on the uprising against President Bashar Assad and found themselves trapped inside the besieged Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr.
Also stuck in the rebel-held neighborhood, which has been under a tight government siege and daily shelling for nearly four weeks, was Javier Espinosa of Spain.
The Syrian government has prevented most reporters from working in the country and many journalists have been crossing into Syria illegally from Lebanon and Turkey.
The Baba Amr section of Homs has been the target of the heaviest Syrian military shelling during a four-week siege of rebel-held parts of Homs. Rebel forces said Thursday they were pulling out of the neighborhood, and a Syrian government official said the army had moved in. Activists say hundreds have been killed in Homs.
But complicating the picture, the Syrian state news agency reported late Thursday that specialists from the Syrian government had found the bodies of three foreign journalists. It said they had been disinterred and would be transferred to Damascus so they could be identified and returned to their countries.
The report said the bodies were of Colvin, Ochlik and Espinosa. Syrian government officials could not be reached for further comment. Espinosa’s domestic partner and his employer, El Mundo, said he is safe in Lebanon.
Reached at her home in East Norwich, New York, Colvin’s mother, Rosemarie, said the family had received conflicting reports about her daughter’s body.
“We’re not getting any kind of decent information. It’s all contradictory,” she said. It was unclear if she had seen the video.
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