Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent considered one of the most famous war correspondents, whose name has been linked with covering the Iraq War since 1990 with CNN, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 91, according to American media.
Arnett was suffering from prostate cancer.
Peter Arnett, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the Associated Press (AP), became renowned for covering wars throughout a career spanning decades, from Vietnam to El Salvador to the Gulf.
His global fame as a news correspondent began in Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975, where he accompanied soldiers on their missions.
He was among the last correspondents to leave Saigon after its fall to the Communists.
He continued to collaborate with "AP" until 1981 before joining CNN.
In 1991, Arnett traveled to Baghdad as the Gulf War broke out and interviewed Saddam Hussein.
He became famous for his live reporting of events, sometimes using his cell phone and from his hotel room.
He resigned from CNN in 1991 after the network retracted a report he made claiming that the deadly sarin gas was used on defector American soldiers in Laos in 1970 during the Vietnam War.
Arnett, who received several awards, covered the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic.
He interviewed Osama bin Laden in March 1997 "somewhere in Afghanistan," four years before the September 11 attacks.
He left NBC in 2003 after giving an interview to Iraqi television criticizing the U.S. military strategy.
Peter Arnett was born on November 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, and began his career collaborating with the local newspaper "Southland Times" before moving to Thailand to work for an English-language newspaper.
He acquired American citizenship and lived in Southern California from 2014 with his wife, Nina Nguyen, and their children, Elsa and Andrew, according to American media.
In 1995, he published his memoirs titled "Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones."
