British photographer Giles Duley injured in Afghanistan | World news

• Ben Quinn
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  Friday 11 February 2011 21.28 GMT

• Article history

 

A US soldier keeps watch near a village in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Giles Duley – a British photographer – has been injured in the province. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

A British photographer has been seriously injured by a roadside blast while embedded with the US army in southern Afghanistan.

Giles Duley, who specialises in covering humanitarian issues, was flown back to the UK after undergoing multiple amputations at the UN hospital in Kandahar following the incident on Monday.

The New York Times reported that he had stepped on a makeshift bomb while accompanying a foot patrol of US soldiers from the 1st Squadron, 75th Cavalry Regiment, and Afghantroops.

His brother, David Duley, was quoted as saying the journalist had lost one leg below the knee and another above the knee, while his left arm was severed above the elbow. However, he had escaped any internal injuries and has been conscious and lucid during treatment in the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham after being flown back to the UK.

He was "surprising everyone with his resilience and humour" and was awake on Thursday, "talking, joking and flirting with a nurse", according to his brother.

The photographer had planned to start his own quarterly journal, tentatively titled Document, David Duley added, and had already said that he will resume his work.

"Giles is a triple amputee, but he is still a photographer," his brother said. "He still intends to do what he does. This is not going to stop him. He was fully aware of where he was going and what he was getting himself into."

The 39-year-old freelancer, whose photographs have appeared in publications including Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, and the Sunday Times, has also worked for Médecins sans Frontières and the Camera Press agency in London.

A statement issued on behalf of his family and the Camera Press agency said he had been in Afghanistan for less than two weeks when he was wounded, and was covering military operations for the first time. The Foreign Office has confirmed that Duley had been injured during the incident on 7 February and added that consular assistance had been made available to his family.

In January last year, Rupert Hamer, defence correspondent of the Sunday Mirror, became the first British journalist to be killed in Afghanistan when the armoured vehicle in which he was travelling was hit by a roadside bomb. Philip Coburn, a photographer with the same newspaper, suffered severe leg injuries.