And Now There Are Ten

As she walked toward a government position near Cambodia's embattled Highway 4 one day early in April, U.P.I. Correspondent Catherine Webb called to some fellow reporters, "I'm just going up to have a look." That was the last anyone saw or heard of the gentle, soft-voiced New Zealander. Minutes later, Communist mortars opened up on the Cambodian position, and when North Vietnamese regulars followed up with a savage ground attack, the surviving government troops ran for their lives.

Moving back into the overrun position, Cambodian troops recently came upon several bodies. One of them, found partially clothed in a shallow grave, with a bullet wound in the chest and another in the head, was almost certainly Kate Webb's. She had become U.P.I.'s bureau manager in Phnom-Penh last February, at the age of 28, after her predecessor, Frank Frosch, was gunned down along with Pulitzer-prizewinning Photographer Kyoichi Sawada in a Viet Cong ambush. Webb is the tenth journalist known to have died in Cambodia since the war spilled across its borders last spring; 19 others are listed as missing. In one year, Cambodia has accounted for more than half the total of 52 journalists who have been killed or have disappeared in Indochina since 1955.

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