Reply #26: SFChronicle: Activist for war victims killed in car bomb attack

[Jack Rabbit]

From the San Francisco Chronicle
Dated Monday April 18

Noted activist for war victims killed in car bomb attack
Californian Marla Ruzicka championed humanitarian aid in Iraq
By Charles Burress, Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writers

A car bomb attack near Baghdad has killed a well-known activist from Northern California who entered war zones to record civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and secure aid for those caught in the cross fire.

Marla Ruzicka, 28, of Lakeport (Lake County), founder of CIVIC -- Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict -- died with her driver on the Baghdad Airport road Saturday when a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of security contractors that was passing next to her vehicle, according to her family and news reports quoting U.S. Embassy officials in Iraq.

The target of the attack apparently was not Ruzicka's vehicle, said her mother, Nancy Ruzicka, who received the account from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

She was killed while traveling "to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war," said CIVIC representative April Pedersen in a statement on the group's Web site.

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