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Phil Goodwin



Phil Goodwin, correspondent Lyse Doucet and producer Keith Morris were the only journalists travelling on the Presidential plane as President Karzai flew to Kandahar for a family wedding.

Phil Goodwin

That afternoon, Karzai decided to defy his bodyguards and go walkabout in the centre of Kandahar. A large crowd developed while he toured a new regional building.



Goodwin, filming as Karzai returned to his car, found himself about three feet away from the President’s attacker.



"My first thought was that it was a warning shot - a young man had gone right up to President Karzai‚s car window - and I thought a bodyguard was warning people away.” Anxious not to miss anything, Goodwin carried on filming. This footage comes from an edit made 40 hours after the start of filming."



The pictures showed the world that the troubles in Afghanistan were not over, and demonstrated the fragility of President Karzai’s position and the lack of contingency planning.



Also, the footage shows a young man shown at Karzai’s window when the attack happened. This was was a plastic tray salesman called Azimullah, who reacted faster than anyone and struggled with the gunman – and died in the hail of bullets.



Without these pictures, the rescuing of the President might have been put down solely to the American bodyguards.



Cameraman’s comments



"I got one shot of him [Karzai] waving from behind, then moved forward past him and swivelled round - still rolling - to see his face. When you’re working fast it’s often quicker to keep filming instead of switching the camera on and off, so that’s why I was rolling when I swung round and the attack happened……..instinct took over.



I got as much of the attack as I could before a huge amount of American fire began to pour down and a healthy sense of preservation saw me taking cover in a nearby doorway.



I was proud of the way I filmed the aftermath. Years of agency work in conflict situations kicked in and I knew that however tempting it is to film the blood and gore of an event, those are the shots which don’t get used for taste reasons. So I tried to film shots that could be broadcast."



Biography



A freelancer since 2001, Phil Goodwin has worked for APTN as South Asia Senior Producer based in Delhi, and also in the Far East and Afghanistan where he recorded the Taliban period in the country, including executions -- filmed secretly -- in the capital Kabul.



For the BBC, Phil was Islamabad Correspondent. As part of the BBC team who came into the Afghan capital with the permission of the Taliban, he filmed the last few days of the city under the Taliban and was in the thick of things when the city fell.



He filmed the shot of BBC Correspondent William Reeve being blown off his chair during a live interview, when their office was bombed by the Americans on the night the city fell.



In 2002, he covered the suicide squads of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka -- the Black Tigers, spent the Iraq war embedded with a British ship, and went on to work in Basra.