Funeral of ‘queen of intrepid journalists’ Marie Colvin is held in New York

MARIE Colvin was remembered as a fearless seeker of truth, as hundreds of mourners, including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, paid their respects to the war correspondent yesterday.

A group of Sri Lanka immigrants held a placard calling Colvin the “uncrowned queen of intrepid journalists”, and a huge American flag hung outside the funeral home in Oyster Bay, New York, the town where the 56-year-old grew up.

Colvin worked for the Sunday Times. She was killed on 22 February when a building that served as a makeshift media centre in Homs was struck by a Syrian army mortar. “She was looking for beauty and truth, and she was telling the world about the vicious crimes,” said Malek Jandali a Syrian-American musician whose family is from Homs.

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Seetharam Sivam, an immigrant from Sri Lanka, said he wanted to pay his respects because Colvin’s writing a decade ago had brought attention to violence involving the Tamil ethnic group. Colvin lost an eye while covering the civil conflict in Sri Lanka in 2001.

“She took the risks and went into war zones. She brought the truth of the Tamil plight to the world,” Mr Sivam said.