Gabriel Gruener, 35, a Germanophone Italian journalist, originally from Malles (Bolzano), had studied at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) before starting in 1991 to work for the German weekly Stern, where he had established himself as a special war correspondent. An expert on the Balkans, Gruener had covered Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, but also other hot, or rather incandescent spots in the world: Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria and Sudan. He was a young man of great courage and professionalism. On June 13th 1999, Gruener and his German colleague Volker Kraemer, a 56-year-old photographer, also from Stern, were at a checkpoint at the Dulje Pass, in Western Kosovo, when they were hit by gunshots from a sniper, one of many who haunted that tormented region. Kraemer died instantly, Gruener instead died in a hospital in Macedonia where he had been transported in a condition that seemed desperate from the outset.
(from Memorial Day of journalists killed by mafia and terrorism, Rome, 2008)
(Update by Raffaella Della Morte and Marta Ramadori, 3 May 2020)
- In June 1999, the war in Kosovo had ceased for three days when Gabriel Gruener and his colleague Volker Kramer were killed. The end of hostilities had been declared but tensions persisted throughout the territory. Gruener and Kramer were accused of imprudence. Their colleagues at Stern, the magazine they worked for and which had already lost two journalists (in 1995 Jochen Piest was killed by a sniper in Grozny, Chechnya, and in 2001 Volker Handloik was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan) denied those allegations and stated that as true professionals they had never taken risks unnecessarily. The investigations established that their death was due to pure accident.
