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Sweden mourns slain journalist

Stromberg had three young children

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Colleagues have been paying tribute to a Swedish cameraman shot dead by gunmen during an armed robbery in northern Afghanistan.

Ulf Stromberg, 42, a cameraman for Sweden's TV4, was shot at a house in Taloqan. He was the eighth journalist killed in Afghanistan since the beginning of the U.S.-led military campaign.

"Ulf was a perfectionist but now I think of him, above all, in his role as a father," Jan Scherman, programme director at TV4, told Reuters. Stromberg was married and the father of three small children.

"We will now bring all our people home (from Afghanistan) as soon as possible," Scherman said.

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He said it was always difficult for editorial management to send staff to trouble spots.

"We are always very careful but nobody can protect himself against this kind of bandits and robbers whose only purpose is to kill and steal," he said.

Stromberg was woken by a knock on the door early on Tuesday and was shot in the chest, reporter Rolf Porseryd, who was in the house at the time, told TV4.

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

Porseryd said he and journalists from the newspaper Aftonbladet staying in the next room tried to revive Stromberg and took him to a hospital, where a doctor pronounced him dead. Porseryd said he did not see the killers.

The attack came after a robbery of the house, in which two young masked men armed with Kalashnikov rifles took cameras, computers, a satellite telephone and money, according to an article published in Aftonbladet on Tuesday.

Taloqan has been the base for many foreign journalists covering the siege of Konduz. The city fell to the Northern Alliance late on 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.

Stromberg had worked for TV4 since 1998, the network said.