He knew more of the chaos of war than most generals

Patrick Cockburn - a longtime colleague of Kim Sengupta remembers a courageous correspondent always determined to get as much fun as possible out of the direst situation

- Patrick Cockburn

I can scarcely believe that Kim Sengupta is dead because I have such vivid memories of him surviving great dangers against the odds. He was brave and determined, but also smart and resilient, which was why he had lived to report so many wars.

I recall talking to him – still shaken and with cuts on his face – in the Hamra hotel in Baghdad in 2005, soon after a suicide bomber had blown up a truck packed with explosives close to the side of the hotel where Kim had his room. He told me that he had been lying on his bed reading so that the bigger shards of glass from the shattered windows had missed him.

“Security people always tell us that the safest place during a bombing is the bathroom, because it usually has no windows, but luckily I didn’t have time to follow their advice,” he told me with a half-laugh, showing me a photograph of his bathroom in which the ceiling had fallen in.

He explained that there had been two truck bombs, the first to blast through the hotel’s security wall and a second, packed with a thousand pounds of explosives, which was meant to pass through the gap and strike the main body of the hotel.