(JTA) — Bob Simon, the Emmy Award-winning CBS News and “60 Minutes” correspondent, was killed in a car accident in New York City.
Simon, who covered nearly every major overseas conflict and news story since the late 1960s, reportedly was a passenger in a hired car on Wednesday evening that hit another car on Manhattan’s West Side. He was 73.
He was pronounced dead upon arrival at Saint Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, Reuters reported, citing police.
Simon earned 27 Emmy Awards and was awarded the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for a “60 Minutes II” report on genocide during the Bosnian War.
His career in war reporting began in Vietnam, according to The Associated Press. Simon was held captive in Iraq for 40 days in January 1991 after being captured with a CBS News team while reporting on the Gulf War. He wrote about the experience in his book “Forty Days.”
As a prisoner of the Iraqis, Simon told JTA in 1991, he worried that “his Jewishness might cost him his life.”
“I thought my number was up when they started accusing me of being a member of Mossad,” he told JTA.
Simon returned to Iraq in 1993 to report on the American bombing of the country.
In April 2012, Simon faced the wrath of the pro-Israel community following his report on the plight of Christians in the West Bank and Jerusalem that focused on Israeli policies as a cause of the decline of the area’s Arab Christian population, as well as its reliance on an anti-Israel Palestinian Lutheran pastor as a key source.
He had worked in the CBS Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981.
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