ATLANTA – CNN photojournalist Margaret Moth, who survived a near-fatal gunshot wound to the face while filming in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the wars there in the early 1990s, died Sunday. She was 59.
CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard confirmed that Moth died in Rochester, Minn., where she was in hospice care. A CNN obituary says she had suffered from colon cancer for three years.
Moth, a camerawoman, was seriously wounded by sniper fire that hit a CNN van in July 1992 in Sarajevo. After several reconstructive surgeries, she returned to the war-torn country two years later, according to a documentary on her life. She was among scores of journalists hurt or killed covering the conflict in Bosnia and Croatia during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.
Born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand, she later changed her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth. She said in the September 2009 CNN documentary, “Fearless: the Margaret Moth Story,” that she wanted to have her own name, not the one people are given because of their fathers. Moth also was a skydiver and would jump from a Tiger Moth airplane, she said.
She said she got her first camera when she was 8. She came to the U.S. and worked for KHOU in Houston, Texas, for about seven years before starting with CNN in 1990.