Photojournalist Emilio Morenatti Moved To Baltimore Rehab Center

 

BALTIMORE, MD (August 25, 2009) — An Associated Press photographer whose left foot was amputated after a bomb blast in Afghanistan has been transfered to a rehabilitation hospital in Baltimore where he will be fitted for a prosthesis, AP says.

Emilio Morenatti was wounded August 11 while on assignment with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan. Two U.S. soldiers and an AP Television News videographer, Andi Jatmiko, were also injured when their vehicle ran over a bomb that had been planted in the desert.

Morenatti, 40, was treated at a military hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and then in Dubai before being transferred last week to the University of Maryland Medical Center's Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where AP says Morenatti was moving about with the aid of a walker.

He has now been transfered to the Kernan Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation Hospital, and Morenatti told AP in a brief telephone interview that getting out of the hospital for the ambulance ride to Kernan brightened his spirits considerably.

"I feel that I will be able to be okay," Morenatti said. "I am completely optimistic." The photojournalist is expected to be at the rehab center for two to three months and his wife, Marta Ramoneda, is with him in Baltimore, AP reports.

Morenatti has years of experience in war zones. A Spaniard who has been based in Islamabad, he has worked for the AP in Afghanistan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. He was the University of Missouri School of Journalism's Pictures of the Year International Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2009.

In 2006, he was kidnapped in Gaza City and freed unharmed after 15 hours. The following year, AP says, he suffered a broken leg from a fragment of a stun grenade while covering a protest in a West Bank village.

Jatmiko, who suffered leg injuries and broken ribs in the bomb blast, is now home in Jakarta, Indonesia, where colleagues welcomed him back last week to the AP bureau.

 

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