Swedish journalist killed in robbery in Afghanistan

TALOQAN, Afghanistan (AP) -- A Swedish television journalist was killed early Tuesday in northern Afghanistan after armed men robbed the house where he was staying.

Ulf Stroemberg, a cameraman for Sweden's TV4, was the eighth journalist to die in Afghanistan since the start of the U.S.-led military campaign on Oct. 7.

Two young masked men armed with Kalashnikov rifles broke into the house where a group of Swedish journalists was staying and took cameras, computers, a satellite telephone and money from journalists working for Aftonbladet, the newspaper reported.

They then moved to the next room, where Stroemberg was staying, and awoke Stroemberg with a knock on the door, said Rolf Porseryd, the reporter with whom he was sharing the room.

"As soon as he opened the door there was a bang. Ulf fell over me. 'I'm hit, I'm shot,"' Porseryd said in a telephone interview with the broadcaster.

Porseryd said he and the Aftonbladet journalists tried to revive Stroemberg and rushed him to a hospital, where a doctor pronounced him dead.

Taloqan has been the base for scores of foreign journalists covering the siege of Kunduz. The city fell to the northern alliance late Sunday after a two-week siege.

Four journalists -- two from the Reuters news agency, one from the Italian daily Corriere della Sera and one from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo -- were ambushed and killed last week on the road between the eastern city of Jalalabad and the capital, Kabul.

Earlier this month, two French radio journalists and a writer for a German magazine died while reporting from the front lines in northern Afghanistan.

Stroemberg, 42, had worked for TV4 since 1998, the network said. He leaves behind a wife and three children, it said.