Hundreds of people gathered today to pay their respects to Kim Sengupta, The Independent’s World Affairs Editor who died last year.
Family, friends and journalists filed into St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street to say a fond farewell and hear the stories of his life as recalled by those closest to him.
Kim, 68, died suddenly at home and tributes poured in from journalists, generals and MPs, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
Geordie Greig, The Independent’s editor-in-chief, had known Kim for more than 40 years and described his fearlessness in reporting in conflict zones around the world, including Syria, Libya, Syria, Turkey, Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti and Sri Lanka.
“Kim wriggled across frontiers, skidded toward danger, dodged bullets, avoided capture, interrogation and incarceration,” he said in his address. “Also - he avoided editors, he really didn’t like being in the office.
“He was most comfortable on the road. The thrill of the chase, the freedom of a journey, in pursuit of testimony and truth through the prism of reportage; a journalist addicted to the front line.
“A fearless observer and questioner with a gregarious and chucklesome presence, he excelled as a raconteur as well as a war correspondent who eyed up and then took calculated risks. Always trying to bring clarity to areas of confusion, darkness, and danger.”
Greig recounted stories of Kim’s charm and his determination to always speak to people on the ground to find out what was really going on.
“The first draft of history comes through reportage, sustaining and explaining those whose stories must be told. The oppressed. The undertrodden. The civilians at war. The wounded. The grieving. The plotters, planners, pilots, spooks, marksmen and defenders, the witnesses and participants in conflict. Being there matters. Kim was always there.”
Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, joined Lindsey Hilsum, international editor at Channel 4, to give a shared tribute, both describing Kim’s kindness and humour as they covered the darkest of news events in the most dangerous of circumstances.
Lamb said: “Kim was the only journalist that whenever I arrived somewhere and he had got there before me, I was happy because I knew I would have good company, someone to have dinner with over a glass or three.
“Personally I can’t imagine going anywhere and him not being there. I remember diving behind a car in central Harare as Mnangagwa’s thugs started shooting and of course who was there but Kim, calm as ever.
“’We’re getting too old for this,’ he said.”
Hilsum, who worked alongside Kim in multiple war zones, told how she had gone back through the messages she and Kim had exchanged on Whatsapp and his humour and understated take on the world shone through.
“Kim was always there,” she said. “We are a small, strange travelling circus, we journalists who go to conflict zones. Kim was the heart of us. The very centre. I can’t imagine what it will be like to go back to Ukraine or Israel and he won’t be there.”
Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent, read an extract from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, which spoke about filling the gap someone leaves.
The reading was chosen by Kim’s partner Katherine Rimell, who gave a beautiful account of the life they shared together, away from the frontline and war reportage.
Caroline Gammell, assitant editor at The Independent, read from Kim’s work, a powerful piece he wrote two years after the fall of Kabul in 2021.
Kim had been deeply moved by the suffering of the Afghan people during the chaotic evacuation of international troops from Hamid Karzai international airport.
He had been particularly affected by the plight of an eight-year-old girl who had been frantically looking for her mother - and then found her body under a tattered shroud.
“Some of us who were reporting on those last days of the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan had conflict for a long time.
“I had been to the country around two-dozen times across two decades. We has seend our share of horror and injury from bomb and bullets.
“But the deaths at the airprt, so distressing and so unnecessary, were particularly poignant.”
As part of the service, a collection was taken for the Friends of Aschiana, which supports a school for children in Afghanistan.
Here is Geordie Greig’s eulogy in full:
At The Independent a frequent question was: Where is Kim?
With a militia leader in Beirut?
Arranging a fixer in Kyiv?
In the bombed-out hotel in Baghdad asleep in a windowless room having survived a bomb blast?
Having dinner with a spook in the Reform Club.
On a plane. On a train. In a taxi. On the move.
The question Where is Kim? meant cross-referencing Libya, Syria, Turkey, Gaza, Ukraine. Haiti, Sri Lanka, Romania, and most other trouble spot across the globe where, as Kim would say, things had bubbled up.
Kim wriggled across frontiers, skidded toward danger, dodged bullets, avoided capture, interrogation and incarceration.
Also - he avoided editors, he really didn’t like being in the office.
He was most comfortable on the road.
The thrill of the chase, the freedom of a journey, in pursuit of testimony and truth through the prism of reportage; a journalist addicted to the front line.
A fearless observer and questioner with a gregarious and chucklesome presence, and a “comfortable figure” he excelled as a raconteur as well as a war correspondent who eyed up and then took calculated risks. Always trying to bring clarity to areas of confusion, darkness, and danger.
Kim loved to combine the comic with the critical. How did he get over the border into Sudan after most others were turned away - a border official spotted in his wallet his Reform Club membership card!
On another occasion Kim got a free pass on the battle front as the maître D of a hotel where he had once stayed recognised him, that maitre’d had risen to be a military leader. Only Kim could turn a martini hour into an access all areas war pass.
He started on old Fleet Street at the Mail when typewriters clacked away and copytakers took down stories. And of course, when he started he routinely went for a what was called a conference quickie, a pint in the Harrow or Dirty Duck aka the White Swan just as the editors went into their afternoon news conference. Kim was very clear that there was actually time for two drinks. Or on occasion perhaps just one more.... Kim was once found having an afternoon siesta in the soundproof telephone booth at the Mail. But he was also part of the media’s digital revolution playing his part in the journey of The Independent to being the largest digital news brand in the UK.
Reporters on the road got him, liked him, admired him, and sometimes were surprised by him.
In a Libyan desert town called Ajdabiya, being fought over by government and rebel forces, the outcome was of little or no consequence. Certainly, London wasn’t interested.
Alongside the Mail’s Richard Pendlebury a block away from the main street or square where a sporadic gun battle seemed to be taking place. The Independent’s Kim announced he was going to drive around the block to really see what was going on.
‘Why do that?” Pendlebury asked him “Bloody silly reason to get killed.” He smiled and said “All the same, I’d like to see what’s going on around the next corner.” And he climbed into his car – his local driver wouldn’t accompany him - and off he went, disappearing in the direction of the gunfire.
Eventually the car and Kim came back into view having driven down the main drag.
“What happened?” Pendlebury asked.
Kim paused; “Bit of shooting.”
The most noble part of our trade in my view is to report, risking all for eye-witness accounts, exposing on the way tyranny, turbulence, turpitude, trouble. It is what Kim did, nonchalantly, modestly, effectively, sometimes perhaps like a version of Colombo seemingly laid back, and easeful perhaps at times even a touch shambolically with a nonchalance which masked calculation. But always he manoeuvred adroitly, persistently and bravely.
I first met him in 1982 when I was a very junior late-night reporter on the Mail and he was even then a burgeoning fireman, with a certain swagger and confidence and an instinctive hunger to be at the heart of a story. He lived for it. He breathed it. He had it.
In the last 25 years or so he was a frontier man for The Independent. He was happiest and most comfortable in his skin in the theatre of war, with a notebook in hand and hopefully later that night, a glass or two to share as well as stories, gossip, information.
Graham Greene might have invented Kim. I can hear him ordering Barbancourt rum at the bar of the Olufson Hotel in Haiti, made famous in Greene’s voodoo novel The Comedians, as at ease finding the best drivers and fixers as in the journalist in The Quiet American. Not that Kim was quiet. I can hear him in Port- au-Prince, hating the acronym PAP given by the reductive invading Americans; he would also have snuffled out the best Belgian restaurant up the hill in Pétion-Ville. He loved high, as well as having sometimes to dive low. Spooks and militia and other reporters knew and trusted him.
When he died so suddenly, irony of irony, safely at home, from a stroke, the tributes were extensive, deep grief from the war correspondent coterie but also loss expressed by the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary, MI6, MI5, generals and interpreters but most of all those who were with him in the field and in his own newsroom. And of course, his partner Katherine, waiting for that welcome sense of relief for when he returned from the field, body armour thrown temporarily to the back of the wardrobe.
Kim’s work is a reminder that what he did for the Independent as a reporter of courage and conviction mattered.
The first draft of history comes through reportage, sustaining and explaining those whose stories must be told. The oppressed. The undertrodden. The civilians at war. The wounded. The grieving. The plotters, planners, pilots, spooks, marksmen and defenders, the witnesses and participants in conflict. Being there matters. Kim was always there.
Kim excelled in an imperfect world of conflict. Okay, phones got lost. Expenses exceeded all expectations. The staff at The Reform Club would say glad to have you back Sir. What he loved best was being on the road.
One fellow war reporter from the Times remembered his kindness and humanity when all hell broke loose in Baghdad and he escaped death by a fluke. A shard of glass ten inches stabbed the place where he should have been. But he was more worried about how she was, offering kindness, at a time when he must have been shattered himself. He had a sensibility to support which, as is so often the case, is underestimated at the time until people when are suddenly no longer there. Tough but not ruthless, he also shared and he cared.
We salute you Kim. We will continue do what you do. You have passed on the baton. We take it and cherish it, a thread of connection and belief in what we all try to do in this church for journalists. We will keep doing what you did, being in difficult places to understand what needs to be seen and known, and most important of all, for stories to be told.
