Maria Grazia Cutuli

MILAN, Italy (AP) – Maria Grazia Cutuli did her job passionately, volunteering to cover wars during her vacations and taking every opportunity to go where it was "no place for a woman."

The 39-year-old foreign correspondent was one of four journalists killed in an ambush in Afghanistan on Monday.

Cutuli began her career in her native Sicily, writing for the newspaper La Sicilia. She quickly moved to nationwide publications, covering conflicts in Africa and other places for the Italian weekly magazine Epoca.

She joined Corriere della Sera, the respected Italian daily, in 1997 on its foreign news desk, and after a little more than a year, was sent abroad.

"Covering international news was her great passion," said a newsroom colleague, Barbara Stefanelli.

Cutuli was killed the same day Corriere ran a story in which she reported the discovery of vials in a box marked "sarin," the nerve gas, in a camp believed to have been abandoned by Osama bin Laden.

"The article on the nerve gas was for us a scoop," Corriere's editor-in-chief, Ferruccio De Bortoli said. "But no scoop is worth a life."

Cutuli often used her vacation time to get to know places better for her work, including Rwanda, Israel and Sudan, Corriere wrote in tribute Tuesday.

A female relative once remarked: "Maria Grazia in Liberia? That doesn't seem to me to be a place for a woman.'" That comment, the newspaper wrote, so pleased Cutuli that "she would repeat it every time" she took off for some far-flung place.

"I'm going to Benin, that doesn't seem to be a place for a woman either," Corriere quoted Cutuli as saying.

The newspaper wrote that Cutuli was as "feminine, sensual, sophisticated as she was courageous, tenacious, and stubborn."

She had been in the region since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

De Bortoli, in a front-page tribute, wrote that the newspaper offered to bring her back to Italy for a rest timed to her Oct. 26 birthday.

"You want to give me a present? Leave me here,'" De Bortoli said Cutuli had replied.

Cutuli, who was single, is survived by her mother, Agata D'Amore.


Copyright © 2001 The Associated Press