Last Despatches: Italian Reporters Died Shielding Bosnian Child from Blast

On January 28, 1994, reporter Marco Luchetta, cameraman Alessandro 'Sasa' Ota and technician Dario D'Angelo, who all worked for the Italian public broadcaster RAI-TV, were on assignment in the town of Mostar filming a story about children who were growing up amid the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That day they had been at an orphanage in the city, which since 1993 had been the focus of fighting between the Bosnian Croat wartime force, the Croatian Defence Council, and the Bosniak-led Bosnian Army - a conflict which divided Mostar along ethnic lines.

The three men then went to 82 Marshal Tito Street, where they wanted to record interviews with children whose families had taken refuge in the building.

They had started talking to one child when the area came under attack.

"During the interview, a shell was fired and it killed them on the spot, but at the same time they protected the child they interviewed with their bodies," said Nicola Minasi, the Italian ambassador to Sarajevo.

The child they saved from death, a five-year-old boy called Zlatko, was the grandson of Mostar resident Samija Sijercic.

Sijercic said she had been kicked out of her apartment because of the conflict and her husband was in a detention camp so she moved to 82 Marshal Tito Street, where she lived with Zlatko and her daughter. She and her neighbours at the Marshal Tito Street building moved into the basement when there was shelling.

She recalled how Luchetta, Ota and D'Angelo said they had come to film a report about "the conditions in which children were living in the hell of Mostar - to which we said that they had come to the right place".

One of the journalists asked if he could take Zlatko out into the yard because he could not film...