Hamer, a veteran war correspondent, was killed and Sunday Mirror photographer Philip Coburn was injured while embedded with a U.S. Marine unit. The journalists were traveling in an armored vehicle when it was hit by a roadside bomb. A U.S. Marine was also killed.
The U.K.-based Sunday Mirror said the two journalists had left Britain on New Year's Eve to cover the U.S. troop increase in Afghanistan. Hamer, 39, had been employed by the paper for a dozen years and was making his fifth trip to Afghanistan, the Mirror said. He had also covered the war in Iraq. He was survived by a wife and three children.
The Marines were on patrol near Nawa, in the southern province of Helmand, where U.S., British, and Canadian troops and Taliban fighters had squared off ahead of an expected U.S. military offensive.