A harrowing photo of a young girl standing screaming in the middle of a pile of bodies after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan has won its photographer a Pulitzer Prize.


AFP: Massoud Hossaini

Photographer Massoud Hossaini's Pulitzer for breaking news photography was the first to be awarded to the Agence France-Presse news agency, which he works for.

Hossaini - who joined AFP in 2007 - was just metres away when the bomb
went off at a Shiite shrine on December 6, 2011, killing at least 70 people.



The Pulitzer committee described the image as a "heartbreaking image of a girl crying in fear after a suicide bomber's attack at a crowded shrine in Kabul". "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."



"I knew I should cover this, record everything, all the pain, the people running, crying, shouting, beating their chests, shouting: 'Death to Al Qaeda, death to the Taliban!'"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.

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