Kaveh Golestan.

About fifteen years ago a friend took me to see a friend of his, an Iranian photojournalist called Kaveh Golestan. I didn't know my arse from my elbow at the time and probably showed it.

Kaveh was a quietly spoken man, humorous and warm, the very antithesis of the hard-bitten photojournalist cliche. He'd covered the Ayatollah Khomeini as he returned from exile, the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the aborted US attempt to release hostages from the US Embassy, and later captured the scenes of insane mass grief when the Imam's body was pulled from his coffin during his funeral.

Kaveh was only five miles from Halabja when the Kurdish town was nerve-gassed and was one of few photojournalists to personally witness the guelling, pitiless trench fighting of the Iran-Iraq war.

Kaveh won the Robert Capa Gold medal in 1979 of his coverage of the Revolution. Due to the regime's pressure on the domestic media and his need for anonymity, it would take 14 years before he would collect his medal. He'd also won the Pulitzer Prize...and had done time in jail for angering the clerics.

Fifteen years after our first meeting, I found myself in Sulemaniyeh, Northern Iraq, and bumped into Kaveh again. This time I had a chance to have a long talk with him again. He was a TV cameraman now with the BBC, but still passionate about images and about the unfolding war in Iraq, having felt a particualar kinship with Kurdistan after working there over a 25-year period.

I didn't feel like such a newbie anymore, but I still had plenty to learn. My opinion at the time was the limited US military intervention in the North had finally given the Kurds the chance to fulfil their national liberation struggle, and to rid themselves of the stifling weight of Saddam's dictatorship.

But for Kaveh, it went way beyond 'good' and 'bad' guys and didn't end with falling statues. He'd always had a soft spot for Kurdistan, but gave up photography for good after witnessing Kurdish peshmerga fighters executing prisoners in 1991.

He smiled quietly like he had 15 years earlier, but spoke with sadness and foreboding about the ultimate outcome of the war.

He was absolutely right of course.

We shook hands, wished each other good luck, and went off to cover our separate stories.

Several days later, three years ago today on April 2nd 2003, Kaveh Golestan and his BBC colleagues, reporter Jim Muir and producer Stuart Hughes strayed into a minefield on the outskirts of Kifri, Northern Iraq.

Hughes stepped on an anti-personnel mine, was badly injured and eventually lost his foot.

Kaveh stepped on a boobytrapped anti-tank mine and was killed instantly.

" I want to show you images that will be like a slap
in your face to shatter your security. You can look
away, turn off, hide your identity like murderers,
but you can not stop the truth. No one can."

Kaveh Ibrahim Golestan. Artist, Photographer, Film-maker. 1950-2003.