New York, January 10, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) mourns the death of our colleague Vikram Singh Bisht, who died yesterday from internal injuries after falling from his wheelchair.
On December 13, 2001, a suicide squad shot Bisht, a cameraman for the New Delhibased news agency Asian News International, while he was covering an attack on the Indian Parliament. The shooting left him paralyzed from the waist down.
The assailants in the 2001 attack had entered the heavily guarded Parliament compound armed with AK-47s, grenades, and other explosives and fought a gun battle with Indian security forces. Fourteen people were killed, including the five attackers. In December 2002, an Indian court sentenced three men from Indian-controlled Kashmir to death for planning the attack.
Bisht was hit by a bullet that became embedded in his spinal cord. He remained hospitalized and largely immobile at the All India Institute of Medial Sciences (AIIMS) until his discharge in November 2002.
On the evening of January 8, he fell from his wheelchair while at home and was taken to the AIIMS, where he died at about 8:30 a.m. the following morning.
