Word broke this morning via André Liohn, a fellow combat photographer who posted the news to his Facebook page: "Sad news Tim Hetherington died in Misrata now when covering the front line. Chris Hondros is in a serious status. Michel Brown and Guy are wounded but fine." Liohn noted Hondros's own death minutes later. Asked by a commenter if this was confirmed, Liohn immediately replied, "Yes."
Hetherington tweeted less than 36 hours ago about the status of the region he was covering: "In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO."
Hetherington's directing debut Restrepo followed a troop of American soldiers in one of the most violent and embattled parts of Afghanistan. He and co-director Sebastian Junger won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival before going on to an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
"We're storytellers, and we're also pretty good at telling stories at the extreme edges," Hetherington told Movieline last year at Sundance. "That's what I do. I would love to tell a story about the rain forest in the Amazon, but the reality is that for the last ten years, that's not what I've been doing. [...] And if you've invested 10 years of life into it or more, then you want to kind of make something, or reach a point where you've distilled something. And I really feel that Restrepo is a distillation of what I've learned about war, and what I've seen of war."
Developing...
· André Liohn [Facebook via Business Insider]