Iconic Brussels Photo Taken Between Screams for Help

Journalist says she was still in shock
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 23, 2016 1:03 AM CDT
Updated Mar 23, 2016 6:41 AM CDT
Iconic Brussels Photo Was Taken Between Screams for Help
Ketevan Kardava took this iconic photo of two women wounded at the Brussels airport on Tuesday.   (Ketevan Kardava/Georgian Public Broadcaster via AP)

The journalist who took an iconic photo of an injured victim amid Tuesday's explosions in the Brussels airport says she was screaming for help at the time. Georgian journalist Ketevan Kardava tells USA Today she was just feet away from the first blast. "Everyone was covered in blood. They lost their legs. All of them," she says. "I kept looking to see my legs. With my hands, I wanted to feel them." She says she called for a doctor and took the photo of the injured, dust-covered woman while she was still in shock. "What do you do in this situation if you're a journalist? Help? Ask doctor to come? Or take a photo?" she says. "In that very moment, I realized that to show the world what was happening in this moment of terror, a photo was more important."

"I don't know how I did it. I don't know how I took that photo," she says. "As a journalist, it was my instinct. I posted it on Facebook and wrote 'Explosion … Help us.'" The injured woman "was in shock, speechless," Kardava tells Time. "There was no crying, no shooting. She was only looking around with fear." Kardava, who had been on her way to an assignment in Geneva, says she had to leave the woman when soldiers arrived and ordered everybody capable of running to get away as fast as they could. 9News reports that the woman in the yellow jacket has been identified as Jet Airways flight attendant Nidhi Chaphekar. The airline says it isn't sure of the extent of her injuries, but she is at a hospital receiving medical care. (More Brussels attack stories.)

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