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Gabriel Gruener

Gabriel Gruener

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WHO WAS

Gabriel Gruener, 35, a Germanophone Italian journalist, originally from Malles (Bolzano), had studied at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) before starting in 1991 to work for the German weekly Stern, where he had established himself as a special war correspondent. An expert on the Balkans, Gruener had covered Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, but also other hot, or rather incandescent spots in the world: Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria and Sudan. He was a young man of great courage and professionalism. On June 13th 1999, Gruener and his German colleague Volker Kraemer, a 56-year-old photographer, also from Stern, were at a checkpoint at the Dulje Pass, in Western Kosovo, when they were hit by gunshots from a sniper, one of many who haunted that tormented region. Kraemer died instantly, Gruener instead died in a hospital in Macedonia where he had been transported in a condition that seemed desperate from the outset.

(from Memorial Day of journalists killed by mafia and terrorism, Rome, 2008)

READ HIS STORY

  • Gabriel Gruener: A Biography
    taken from the collection edited by Monica Andolfatto for the book Day of Memory of Journalists killed by mafias and terrorism, Rome, 2008

THE SEARCH FOR THOSE RESPONSIBLE

(Update by Raffaella Della Morte and Marta Ramadori, 3 May 2020)

  • In June 1999, the war in Kosovo had ceased for three days when Gabriel Gruener and his colleague Volker Kramer were killed. The end of hostilities had been declared but tensions persisted throughout the territory. Gruener and Kramer were accused of imprudence. Their colleagues at Stern, the magazine they worked for and which had already lost two journalists (in 1995 Jochen Piest was killed by a sniper in Grozny, Chechnya, and in 2001 Volker Handloik was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan) denied those allegations and stated that as true professionals they had never taken risks unnecessarily. The investigations established that their death was due to pure accident.

RECOGNITION

  • In Kosovo, at the Dulje Pass, a slab was placed in memory of Gabriel Grüner and Volker Krämer.
  • After their death, the two journalists were remembered and honoured at a ceremony organized by Stern. Grüner has received numerous awards, including the World Press Photo Award and a Royal Society of Photography award.
  • 2003 – Grüner’s partner, Beatrix Gerstberger, also a journalist, six months pregnant at the time of his death, recounted the story of Gabriel in a book along with stories of other women who had lost their husbands.
  • Gruener’s name is also listed in the Journalist Memorial of the Newseum in Washington which contains the faces and names of journalists killed while doing their work.
  • At the Casa del Jazz in Rome it is remembered on the Plaque of the innocent victims of mafias affixed to the entrance and on the Memorial Panel of Ossigeno per l’Informazione .

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