A 26-year-old French photojournalist who had
spent months documenting the conflict in
Central African Republic has been killed, the
French presidency said on Tuesday.
Camille Lepage, a freelance photographer
whose work was published in major French and
American newspapers, died in a village near
the town of Bouar.
"All means necessary will be used to shed light
on to the circumstances of this murder and to
find her killers," the statement said.
Lepage's body was found by French
peacekeepers inside a vehicle that had been
driven by Christian militia fighters, the
statement said. In her last tweet about a week
ago, Lepage said she was embedding with the
fighters known as the anti-Balaka who were
battling the remnants of a Muslim rebellion
known as the Seleka.
"We left at 3:30am to avoid the Misca [African
peacekeeping] checkpoints and it took us 8
hours by motorbike as there is no proper
roads to reach the village," she tweeted.
'Forgotten conflicts'
A native of Angers, France, Lepage also had
worked extensively in Juba, South Sudan,
before moving to the Central African Republic.
In an interview with a photography blog,
PetaPixel, she said she was drawn to covering
forgotten conflicts.
"I want the viewers to feel what the people are
going through, I would like them to empathise
with them as human beings, rather than seeing
them as another bunch of Africans suffering
from war somewhere in this dark continent,"
she said.
Lepage had recently travelled to New York for
a prestigious portfolio review and workshop at
the New York Times. Her work had appeared in
the newspaper, as well as on Al Jazeera, in the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and
the Los Angeles Times. She also had sold
images to French newspapers including Le
Monde and Liberation.
Al Jazeera's Nazanine Moshiri met Lepage in
Bangui in December and described her as a
"talented and driven photo journalist, with a
unique eye for the story".
"She was also simply a lovely person, always
willing to share her contacts, and her stories
after a hard day of work," our correspondent
said of Lepage.
"What happened to Camille shows how
dangerous Central African Republic has
become. There are no clear front lines, once
you leave the capital Bangui, you really are in
the hands of the local group that you have
entrusted with your life."
