Gaby Rado

Gabor Andras Rado, journalist: born Budapest, Hungary 17 January 1955; married first Carol Watson (two sons, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved), secondly Desa Stepanovic; died Suleimaniya, Iraq 30 March 2003

Humanity and compassion were two abiding qualities that Gaby Rado brought to his work as foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News, perhaps a reflection of the pain he himself endured during his life. His father, who served in the Hungarian army, was taken prisoner by the Russians during the 1956 uprising, and his four-year-old son Nicky died in a swimming accident 12 years ago.

After spending his early years under Soviet rule, Rado was at the Berlin Wall when it fell and witnessed the collapse of Russia's empire. "We all thought in 1989 that it was the end of history, the end of foreign news," he once said. "There couldn't be anything as big as the Berlin Wall. But how wrong we were. It just goes on and on."

Reporting the horrors of war in the former Yugoslavia as it fell into the abyss became all-consuming for him. "I watched as the rise of rabid nationalism ripped apart the Balkans and I became totally absorbed – for years," he explained.

As hundreds of thousands died in the atrocities, many the victims of "ethnic cleansing" by the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian paramilitaries, Rado brought Channel 4 News viewers a string of exclusive stories.

In March 1993, he and his team smuggled out of Bosnia a report revealing that all five mosques in the town of Bijelina had been dynamited in one night by a Serb paramilitary group. Seven years later, he was the first journalist to explain that the fall of Milosevic was not the result of a spontaneous uprising, but a plot to overthrow him, led by the Mayor of Cacak in Serbia, 90 miles from the capital, Belgrade. More recently, he covered Milosevic's trial at the Hague.

His reports from Kosovo, where Albanians were fighting for independence from the Yugoslav government in 1999, revealed the refugee crisis and the military build-up, and led to his being expelled from that Serbian province by the Milosevic regime.

Rado's accounts of the ways in which individuals were affected by such upheavals helped to make political and economic issues accessible. In reporting the opening of a bridge linking Serb and Muslim areas, he focused on a grandmother who was crossing it to see her grandchildren for the first time. "It was incredibly heart-rending stuff and it still makes me burst into tears when I see it," he said later.

Born in the Hungarian capital of Budapest in 1955, a year before Russian troops crushed an anti- Soviet uprising, Rado fled the country for England with his family when he was eight. He went to King's College School in Wimbledon, south-west London, and read English at Christ's College, Cambridge, beginning his journalism career as a reporter on the Kentish Times in 1976. He moved to BBC Radio Leicester (1978-79) and then to BBC Television in London, as a sub-editor.

In 1985, after a year spent freelancing for the then ITV London broadcaster Thames Television and the BBC, Rado joined ITN as a writer for its news programmes on ITV. He became a reporter on Channel 4 News three years later and was soon covering the momentous events that brought the Cold War to an end in his own homeland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, and the fallout in some of those countries.

After serving as the programme's Moscow correspondent (1991-92) during the break-up of the Soviet Union, he became foreign affairs correspondent and witnessed the signing, by the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat, of another failed Middle East peace agreement at the White House in 1993. Then, he watched as South Africans placed their votes in their first democratic election.

Throughout the 1990s, Rado kept returning to the Balkans and he believed television was instrumental in ending war there. "Bill Clinton woke up in July '95 to see that 7,000 people had been massacred in Bosnia," he said. "TV was screaming, 'This cannot go on.' It seems to me to be no coincidence that, in early August, Operation Storm began." (Operation Storm, in which the CIA was alleged to be involved, was the Croatian army's successful campaign to regain Serb-held territory, which helped, along with Nato bombing, to bring the Serbs to the negotiating table.)

In March 1997, Rado was the only foreign journalist to report from Albania during the uprising that led to the government's overthrow there. Four years later, he was among the first correspondents to report the outbreak of war on Afghanistan.

He won three Amnesty International journalism awards: in 1996 for his reports on Serb genocide in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica; in 1998 for a report on the oppression of a Muslim minority, the Uighurs, in north-western China; and in 2002 for explaining the Kosovan background to the Milosevic trial.

Rado had been reporting for Channel 4 News on the activities of Kurdish and coalition troops in the area around Suleimaniya, in northern Iraq, when he fell from a hotel roof in the town, 50 miles from the front line. He suffered fatal head injuries.

Anthony Hayward