ISIS Sniper Kills Dutch Journalist

A Dutch photojournalist captured and held for a week by ISIS in Syria in 2012 was killed by one of the group's snipers in Libya on Sunday. A Libyan government spokesman says Jeroen Oerlemans, 46, was shot in the chest during a battle in the coastal city of Sirte that also killed eight pro-government fighters and around 50 ISIS members, the New York Times reports. Fellow journalist Joanie de Rijke says she and Oerlemans were accompanying a mine-clearing team when he was shot, the AP reports. She says he was clearly identifiable as a journalist, "but it doesn't matter to (ISIS), of course. They shoot at everything and everybody."

Oerlemans had three young children and was due to fly home on Monday. He "is a journalist who kept going where others stopped," Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders said in a statement. "Driven to put the news into pictures in the world's hotspots. It is profoundly sad that he has now paid the ultimate price for this." The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 11 other journalists have been killed in Libya since 2011. "Journalists have recently begun returning in greater numbers to Libya to cover the conflict and political upheaval but it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place," says CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney. (More ISIS stories.)