Karen Fischer

Death of Karen Fischer and Christian Struwe is about two German journalists working for Deutsche Welle who were shot on 7 October 2006 in a tent they had pitched alongside a road near Baghlan in Afghanistan, while they were doing research for a freelance documentary. They were the first foreign journalists killed after the 2001 invasion in the War in Afghanistan

Both Karen Fischer and Christian Struwe worked for Deutsche Welle, which is a German news service. DW was moving its Afghan radio service from Germany to Afghanistan. Struwe, a radio engineer and journalist, worked for DW for five years. He had just completed launching an international news office at Afghanistan's Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), where he had also trained Afghan journalists. Karen Fischer had been with DW for 3 years, completing her internship there from 2002-2003. She had reported on parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. Before that she had been a reporter for DW in the Middle East and Lebanon. Both of the reporters were considered experienced foreign journalists and had traveled to Afghanistan multiple times in the past for personal or business reasons.

Karen Fischer and Christian Struwe were on a private research trip in Afghanistan, on the way to the historic site of the Buddha statues of Bamiyan, where the Taliban blew up the cultural heritage site in March 2001.

The killings happened on the fifth anniversary of the U.S. troops invading Afghanistan. Fischer and Struwe were also the first foreign reporters killed in Afghanistan since late 2001. Eight journalists in all died in 2001. After the event, officials from Afghanistan condemned the attack and expressed concerns about the safety of journalists in Afghanistan.

Karen Fischer was from Stuttgart, Germany. She attended Northeastern University in the United States and earned her Masters in Journalism in 2000. She and Struwe were a couple (Lebensgefährte), and they had met in Kabul in 2004. Fischer was buried in Leonberg, Baden-Württemberg, which is close to Stuttgart.