Journalist Danish Siddiqui’s body to reach India in a day or two, father says

Indian journalist Danish Siddiqui’s body is in a Kandahar hospital and will be flown home soon, his father said. Danish, a Pulitzer-winning Reuters photojournalist, was killed while covering fighting between government forces and the Taliban in Afghanistan on Friday.

His father, Mohammad Akhtar Siddiqui, told Newslaundry on Saturday that Danish’s body was handed over by the Taliban to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which took it to Kandahar. From there, it will be transferred to the capital Kabul and onwards to India. He expects the body to reach India within a day or two.

Danish, embedded with the Afghan Special Forces, had been covering the fighting between the government forces and the Taliban since earlier this week. In a series of tweets and a report published on July 13, Danish had described a military operation to extract a wounded policeman trapped by the Taliban on the outskirts of Kandahar city for 18 hours.

In recent years, Danish’s coverage of the protests against the new citizenship law, the Covid crisis, and the Delhi communal carnage was instrumental in conveying the gravity of the situation in India to the rest of the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, along with Adnan Abidi, for covering the Rohingya refugee crisis.