Yannis Behrakis

Behrakis died after a long battle with cancer in Athens on 2 March 2019, aged 58. Behrakis is survived by his daughter Rebecca, son Dimitri and his wife Elisavet.

He also covered the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for many years, earthquakes in Kashmir, Turkey, Greece and Iran and major news events around the world. He also covered four Summer Olympics, the 1994 World Cup in the US and many international sports events. He moved with Reuters to Jerusalem as the chief photographer for Israel and the Palestinian Territories in 2008/9. In 2010 he moved back in Greece to cover the financial crisis.

In 2000, Behrakis survived an ambush in Sierra Leone where the American reporter Kurt Schork and Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora of Associated Press Television were killed. He and South African cameraman Mark Chisholm managed to get away from the attackers. In 2016, he led a Thomson Reuters team to win the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

Yannis Behrakis (Greek: Γιάννης Μπεχράκης ; 29 August 1960 – 2 March 2019) was a Greek photojournalist and a Senior editor with Reuters.

Yannis Behrakis was born in 1960 in Athens, Greece. He studied photography in the Athens School of Arts and Technology and received his BA (Honours) from Middlesex University. He worked as a studio photographer in Athens in 1985-86. In 1987 he started a working relation as a contractor for Reuters and in late 1988 he was offered a staff job with the agency based in Athens. His first foreign assignment was in Libya on January 1989. Since then he documented a variety of events including the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the first and second Gulf wars in Iraq, the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the civil war in Ukraine, the Nato bombing of ISIS in Kobane, Syria, the Greek financial crisis and the refugee crisis in 2015.