William D. "Bill" Stewart was an American journalist.
He was murdered in 1979, by the Nicaraguan Government National Guard forces.
He was reporting on the Nicaraguan Revolution as Sandinista rebel forces were closing in on the capital city of Managua.
Footage of his execution was repeatedly broadcast on television, causing the rapid withdrawl of popular and military support in the United States of the Somoza regime.
He was born in 1941 in West Virginia.
He was a Ohio State graduate of 1963.
He came to ABC News from WCCOTV in Minneapolis.
He was an experienced foreign correspondent.
He had been in Nicaragua reporting on the civil war going on at the time.
The war had been between the American backed Somoza dictatorship and the leftist Sandinistas.
On June 20, 1979, the press van he was traveling in, was stopped at a road block in the Eastern slums of the capital city of Managua.
The roadblock was run by the roadblock run by the Nicaraguan Guardia, the main force of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
As a standard precaution, the van was clearly marked as a press vehicle.
Novedades had run an editoria, had run an article the previous day claiming that foreign journalists were a "part of the vast network of communist propaganda".
Stewart and his Nicaraguan interpreter, Juan Francisco Espinosa, exited the van and approached the barricade.
Stewart presented them his press credentials issued by the office of the Nicaraguan president.
Then Stewart's cameraman, Jack Clark spontaneously began filming from inside the van.
A guardsman ordered them to separate.
Stewart was ordered first to kneel and then to lie face down on the ground.
A soldier approached him and kicked him once in the ribs.
Then the solider stepped back and shot him once behind his right ear.
He died instantly.
Before Stewart was killed, the interrupter, Juan Espinosa, had been shot to death off-camera by a different soldier after he approached the guards to ask their permission for an interview.
Later, the driver of the van, Pablo Tiffer López, would testify that soldier remarked, "I'm sure he's no journalist. He's a dog."
And when the soldiers found out that it was indeed an American journalist that was killed that they would say it was a Sandinista sniper that did it.
He was 37 years old when he died.
His body was retrieved by his crew and made its way back to Ashland Kentucky, where he was laid to rest.
His crew smuggled out the footage of his shooting and sent it to New York.
ABC, NBC and CBS ran the footage in their evening broadcast, and rebroadcast it for several days.
The Nicaraguan national guard reported that soon after the killings they had arrested Corporal Lorenzo Brenes.
And that he would be "brought before legal officers".
Brenesm, who was in charge of the roadbloack, stated that he did not witness the shooting.
He said that Stewart's killer was a "Private González" who was killed in combat later the same day.
He also said that Stewart was shot "because he tried to run away".
Since Somoza fled Nicaragua for Miami on July 17, and the regime was overthrown on July 19, 1979, less than a month after Stewart's murder, the fates of those responsible for the shootings are unknown.
There was a fictional account of Stewart's murder told in the 1983 film "Under Fire".
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