Anthony Shadid, New York Times correspondent, dies in Syria

A hearse brought Shadid's body Friday to a forensic science institute in Adana, in southern Turkey, where an autopsy was to be performed, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Hicks and a plain-clothed Turkish military official accompanied the hearse, it said.

Hicks refused to answer reporters' questions about his journey back to Turkey and he followed the coffin into the building, it said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu posted comments about Shadid's death on his Twitter account in English.

"Not only as a good journalist but a true friend as well, Anthony Shadid's death put me in sorrow. Knowing that at the very final moments ... of his life, he was looking for truth," Davutoglu wrote.

Shadid had been reporting in Syria for a week, gathering information on the resistance to the Syrian government and calls for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, the Times said. The exact circumstances and location of his death were unclear, it said.

Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson sent a note to the newsroom Thursday evening, relaying the news of Shadid's death and remembering him.

"Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces," she wrote.

Shadid, long known for covering wars and other conflicts in the Middle East, was among four reporters detained for six days by Libyan forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi last March.

Speaking to an audience in Oklahoma City about a month after his release, he said he had a conversation with his father the night before he was detained.

"Maybe a little bit arrogantly, perhaps with a little bit of conceit, I said, 'It's OK, Dad. I know what I'm doing. I've been in this situation before,'" Shadid told the crowd of several dozen people. "I guess on some level I felt that if I wasn't there to tell the story, the story wouldn't be told."

When Shadid's wife was asked at the time whether she worried about him returning to writing about conflicts, she said as a journalist she understood that he might need to.

"At the end of the day, he's my husband, and the thought of going through life without him and raising our children alone is terrible," she said afterward.

Shadid's father, who lives in Oklahoma City, said a colleague tried to revive his son after he was stricken Thursday but couldn't.

"They were in an isolated place. There was no doctor around," Buddy Shadid said. "It took a couple of hours to get him to a hospital in Turkey."

Associated Press writers Rochelle Hines in Oklahoma City and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey contributed to this report.

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