Kate Peyton was fatally shot just after her arrival in Somalia with the reporter Peter Greste. Her killing occurred just as the Government-in-exile was negotiating to move back to the lawless capital, Mogadishu, from its base in Kenya. Peyton had worked for the BBC for 12 years and was dedicated to reporting on Africa.

Katherine Mary Peyton was born in 1965 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and graduated in civil engineering at Manchester University before taking a postgraduate diploma in radio journalism at Darlington College. She got her first job at the BBC in 1993, at Radio Merseyside as a reporter. There she made an impression with her ability to listen, a trait essential in radio journalism but so often conspicuous by its absence. A friend remembers her as “funny, sensitive and freckly — a great party girl”.

Peyton moved to regional BBC television, based in Manchester, in 1995, and from there to Johannesburg where she worked on a “local hire” basis. The news presenter George Alagiah recalls: “When I first met her, I was learning to be bureau chief in Johannesburg and she was learning to become a producer. She worked on a freelance basis, going from story to story without a guarantee of another job or, indeed, another pay cheque. It was the first sign of the perseverance and quiet determination that marked her career.”

Then a young, slightly diffident trainee, Peyton came to be a confident producer who knew her way around a continent that she increasingly saw as her home. Other correspondents had a great respect for a gentle woman who, Alagiah attests, “was able to remain unruffled and serene when all hell was breaking loose”.

It was only in May 200l that Peyton was given her first staff job, in news gathering on the world planning desk. In August the next year, however, she moved back to Johannesburg as a senior journalist and producer — at last an accomplished newswoman at the hub of the continent she loved. Her assignments took her to Angola, Nigeria, Mozambique, Chad (where she reported on the crisis in Darfur), Zimbabwe and Kenya.

Peyton had settled in Johannesburg with a Congolese cameraman who had worked in the BBC bureau in Dakar, Senegal. She had enrolled his daughter at a public school in Johannesburg, and had given great assistance to other children and refugees who had become her personal friends.

Her murderers fired shots from a passing car close to the Sahafi Hotel in the southern part of the city, which has endured 14 years of factional fighting. She died while in surgery at the city’s Medina Hospital.







Kate Peyton, news reporter, was born on December 13, 1965. She died on February 9, 2005, aged 39.