A winner.......in an appalling situation

"The photographer behind a heartbreaking image of an Afghan girl crying in fear after a suicide bombing attack has been awarded the Pulitzer for best breaking news photography.

Agence France-Presse photographer Massoud Hossaini was awarded the Pulitzer, the most prestigious US journalism prize.

Hossaini's picture of an Afghan girl standing among a pile of dead bodies captured the devastation in the immediate aftermath of the attack on a Shi'ite shrine.

Hossaini was just metres away when the bomb went off on December 6, 2011, killing at least 70 people.

In an interview at the time, Hossaini described what happened.

"I was just looking at my camera when suddenly there was a big explosion,'' he said. "For a moment I didn't know anything, I just felt the wave of the explosion as a pain inside my body. I fell down on the ground.

"I saw everybody running away from the smoke. I sat up and saw my hand was bleeding but I didn't feel any pain,'' he said.

"It's my job to know what is going on so I ran in the opposite direction to everybody else,'' Hossaini continued. ``When the smoke went away I saw I was standing in the centre of a circle of dead bodies.

"They were all together on top of each other. I was standing exactly where the suicide attacker had been.''

Hossaini said he turned to the right and saw the girl, Tarana, whose age has been given as either 10 or 12.

"When Tarana saw what had happened to her brother, her cousins, uncles, mother, grandmother, the people around her, she was just shouting,'' he said.

"She did a lot of things, but if you see my pictures she was just shouting. This shocked reaction was the main thing I wanted to capture,'' he said."

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