Reuters Video: local tragedy | Reuters News Agency

Reuters Video: local tragedy

From German tragedy to Coronavirus trouble, Reuters covers the events that make news.

REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

By Yann Tessier | 28 Feb, 2020

What a week it’s been; Germany reels from the tragedy of a mass shooting, as the community of Hanau begins to face the aftermath one of the worst acts of violence the country has seen in recent times.

Coronavirus continues to dominate health news worldwide, as Reuters journalists capture the moment American passengers departed the quarantined cruise ship.

With so much going on, cut through the noise and share the stories that matter with Reuters Connect…

German tragedy

When staff photographer Kai Pfaffenbach went to bed at 10 pm on Wednesday night at home in the German town of Hanau, little did he know that possibly one of Germany’s most horrific postwar racially-motivated crimes was about to be committed only a short distance away.

“Suddenly my phone started going crazy with all these messages. People saying: ‘there’s a shooting. It’s gang crime,” Kai recalls.

Rushing to the scene, Kai’s professional instincts took over. “30 years of training kicks in – and a good bit of adrenalin. You focus on the job: first video, then pictures, then more video, then more pictures,” he says.

“In the last 20 years I covered the aftermath of 9/11, I was in London after the bombings. I’ve covered all kinds of dramas.

“But this is the first time I returned from an assignment and had an attack of the shivers because of what I’d seen. It’s my town. My community. We’re used to living with each other here.

Thanks to our local presence, we impressed our customers with our speed and accuracy. So fast, in fact, that one customer called to confirm that we were reporting on the same incident. 

Coronavirus trouble

As the impacts of Coronavirus continue to unfold, Reuters journalists have been there to capture the action. Delivering compelling coverage of the foreign national passengers disembarking from the quarantined cruise ship off Japan, on February 16, we exclusively filmed American passengers boarding onto the two US chartered flights pre-dawn at Haneda Airport.

Later that week, on February 19, Reuters was only the agency with live footage of Australians and Hong Kong passengers disembarking the ship during small hours of Thursday. In fact, we were the only agency at the airport to film their chartered planes.

Reuters successfully provided live coverage of the buses carrying Australians arriving at the airport, and boarding onto the plane. We also exclusively filmed Hong Kong passengers arriving at the airport, walking around with luggage. In addition, we secured the fantastic soundbite from a passenger expressing his relief and happiness that he was finally able to go home.