BBC roof memorial to mark journalist casualties

Rarely the first casualties of war, but among its least revered, journalists who have died in conflicts across the world will be commemorated in a memorial unveiled tonight at the BBC’s London headquarters.

Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, will illuminate a glass sculpture set on the refurbished new wing of Broadcasting House in Portland Place.

According to the International News Safety Institute, an average of two people working in the media have been killed every week over the past decade.

Mr Ban will switch on a powerful beam of light that will shine on the sculpture, an inverted glass cone bearing the words of a poem by James Fenton, the former war correspondent.

The timing of the event is particularly poignant for the BBC, which commissioned the sculpture, as two of its journalists - Abdul Samad Rohani in Afghanistan and Nasteh Dahir Farah in Somalia - died in a two-day period this month.

Richard Sambrook, global head of news for the BBC, said: “It is getting more and more common for journalists to be killed in the course of reporting news. We hope that this sculpture will become a new London landmark reminding people of the sacrifice that is made.”

Even by the most conservative accounts, 112 men and women working in the media were killed in Iraq between March 2003 and the end of 2007. The 1939-45 war, by contrast, left 68 reporters, editors, photographers and cameramen dead.

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