Terry Lloyd

Tenacious ITN war correspondent

Terence Ellis Lloyd, journalist: born Derby 21 November 1952; married (one son, one daughter); died near Basra, Iraq 22 March 2003.

Fifteen years after he revealed to the world Saddam Hussein's massacre of 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja in northern Iraq in 1988, Terry Lloyd returned to Iraq to report the war mounted by the United States and British governments to depose Saddam. It was a supreme irony that Lloyd should himself have become a victim of hostilities there. As a war correspondent for Independent Television News for over 20 years, Lloyd never allowed his presence in the front line to dominate the screen, preferring to let the story tell itself, assisted by his talent for describing events graphically and concisely.

Alongside film of rubble and corpses littering the streets of Halabja in 1988, he reported: "The people, the families, we found lying all around had not been injured. They had been poisoned by chemical bombs and shells containing cyanide, mustard and other nerve gases." For the first time, the evidence of Saddam's slaughter of his own people with poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war was documented.

Six years later, Lloyd exclusively reported from the Balkans on the discovery of mass graves at Ovcara containing the remains of almost 300 Croatian men who had been marched at gunpoint from the nearby hospital in Vukovar. The massacre, by Serb militiamen, had occurred 16 months earlier and, Lloyd explained,

The women and children were separated from the men-folk, who included the lightly injured, boys, hospital staff and other townsfolk who had come here believing that they were to be evacuated. Instead, they were led from this back door to the hospital to waiting coaches. Their families have never seen them since.

Born in Derby in 1952, Terry Lloyd was the son of a policeman, Ellis ("Taft") Lloyd, who died when his car skidded off the road as he responded to an emergency call that proved to be a hoax. Lloyd's grandfather, Michael, also a policeman, was shot dead in Dublin in the 1920s.

His elder brother, Kevin, worked as an articled clerk before switching to acting and eventually gained fame as Detective Constable "Tosh" Lines in the ITV police drama The Bill (he died in 1998 after a long battle with alcoholism). Terry Lloyd opted for journalism and gained a solid grounding with Raymonds News Agency in Derby, as a reporter and news editor. He entered television with the Midlands ITV company ATV, which later became Central Television.

In 1983, he joined ITN and covered crime stories for nine months, before becoming a general reporter covering Northern Ireland and events such as the miners' strike. His early foreign reporting included the collapse of the Lebanese government in Beirut, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the 1986 Mexico World Cup. He was also ITN's Midlands correspondent for two years (1991-92), based in Birmingham.

After his world-exclusive report from Halabja, Lloyd proved tenacious in getting news from the front line, but always knew when the risk was too great. Among many assignments in the former Yugoslavia, he showed his trademark calmness while holed up in a Bosnian hotel surrounded by Serb militia in 1992, then three years later reported from Bosnia on the plight of refugees and Nato air strikes against Serb positions around the capital, Sarajevo.

In 1999, when journalists were refused entry into Kosovo, Lloyd and his cameraman, Mike Inglis, gained access over hazardous, snow-topped mountains from Montenegro to film the Serbian advance and to talk to refugees on the way out. Over pictures of his return journey to Montenegro, Lloyd reported:

At long last, we were approaching safety along the beaten track, which has become a lifeline for so many. Journeys end back at the foot of the mountain range. It's been an exhausting experience and it can only be sheer terror which forces the young and the old, the women and the children to make that arduous and perilous trek across the mountains. Thousands have pushed the limits of human endurance already and many more will try if they can.

Lloyd was the only British television reporter aboard the American aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk when it launched planes that bombed Iraq in January 1993 following violations of United Nations sanctions. After the veteran war correspondent Michael Nicholson switched to current affairs reporting for ITV's Tonight programme six years later, Lloyd became ITN's longest-serving reporter.

In testing, but less treacherous, circumstances, he covered British expeditions to the North and South Pole and Richard Branson's attempts to establish a new round-the-world ballooning record, once commandeering a helicopter gunship to rescue the millionaire tycoon from a local warlord in the Algerian desert after a crash landing.

Despite years of war reporting, Lloyd said he had "never been so frightened" as when, in 1995, he was attacked by the footballer Eric Cantona on a beach on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Lloyd had confronted Cantona two weeks after the Manchester United star aimed a kung-fu kick at a Crystal Palace fan, which led to his suspension. Lloyd said he was put into a headlock and was then on the receiving end of a similar kick.

The first ITN journalist to die in the company's 48-year history, Lloyd filed his last report on Saturday, on the Allied advance on the city of Basra.

Anthony Hayward