MUMBAI: The death of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Danish Siddiqui in Kandahar, Afghanistan while he was on duty yesterday, the 16 July 2021 has left people from across the world and party lines, shocked and sad. Tributes and condolences kept pouring in as candlelight vigils were held across the country. 

Siddiqui was killed alongside a senior Afghan officer while covering a clash between Afghan Special Forces and Taliban insurgents in Spin Buldak, Kandahar near a border crossing with Pakistan.

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani expressed shock and offered his condolences while reiterating the affording of absolute protection to media personnel.

In a message released by the Afghan embassy in India, Ghani said, "I am deeply saddened with the shocking reports that Reuters photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed while covering the Taliban atrocities in Kandahar."

Jalina Porter, Principal Deputy Spokesperson at the US Department of State told reporters, "We are deeply saddened to hear that Reuters photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed while covering fighting in Afghanistan, Siddiqui was celebrated for his work often in the world's most urgent and challenging news stories and for creating striking images that conveyed a wealth of emotion and the human face behind the headlines.".

Condoling Siddiqui's death, Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur said that Danish leaves behind an extraordinary body of work. "He won the Pulitzer Prize for photography and was embedded with the Afghan forces in Kandahar. Sincere condolences. RIP," Thakur tweeted. 

India's foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said at the UN Security Council on Friday that India strongly condemns the killing of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Danish Siddiqui in Afghanistan.

Siddiqui who used to head the national Reuters Multimedia team received the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, as part of the Reuters team, for documenting the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. In recent months, his intense images capturing the COVID-19 pandemic in India, especially a drone photograph of mass cremations of COVID-19 victims at Delhi’s Old Seemapuri ground was one of the first to visualise the massive scale of the crisis and were used by media spread across the world.