Officials still don’t know how tragic ambassador got to hospital

Published on 11/10/2012 00:00

The US State Department account of events surrounding the death of ambassador Chris Stevens, who arrived in Libya the day before he died, said agents crawled on their hands and knees through thick diesel smoke to try to find the missing envoy, who somehow was transported to hospital. The US government learned where he was after someone called numbers in his cell phone, officials said. “We do not know exactly how the ambassador got to the hospital. That is one of the issues that we hope to resolve in the ongoing reviews,” one official said.

Stevens, Sean Smith, an information management officer, and five armed US agents were in the compound the night of 11 September. There were also four members of a Libyan militia, assigned as the local government’s protection force. The State Department downplayed earlier assertions that an anti-Muslim film was a trigger for the violence. “That is the question that you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion.”