Relatives of war correspondent Marie Colvin sue Syria over her 2012 death

Relatives of Marie Colvin, a US-born journalist who worked for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, have filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that Syrian government officials targeted and killed her in 2012 to silence her reporting on Syria and the besieged city of Homs.

The lawsuit says Syrian officials launched a rocket attack on a makeshift broadcast studio in a neighbourhood of Homs. Colvin, a veteran correspondent for The Sunday Times, died in that attack along with French photojournalist Remi Ochlik.

Colvin, 56, a native of New York City, was killed on February 22, 2012. Just hours before her death, she filed another report on the Syrian government’s crackdown and its impact on civilians. The attack by Syrian army forces also killed several activists.

Mediator ends his efforts to free Japanese journalist in Syria, saying Tokyo has ignored abductors’ demands

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said at the time that circumstantial evidence and witnesses pointed to the possibility that government forces had taken deliberate action that led to the deaths of Colvin and Ochlik. More than two dozen journalists were reported killed in Syria in 2012 alone.

The wrongful-death lawsuit filed on Saturday in Washington by Cathleen Colvin, Marie Colvin’s sister, and Justine Araya-Colvin, the reporter’s niece, said the Assad regime “hunted down journalists and media activists” who were trying to tell the story of the government’s deadly crackdown on Syrian rebels. The government has contended that its attacks targeted terrorists.