Serena Shim’s Death in Turkey: What Is Known and What Is Disputed

Serena Shim, a 29-year-old American reporter of Lebanese descent working for Iran’s state broadcaster Press TV, died on 19 October 2014 when the car she was travelling in collided with a cement truck near Suruç, a Turkish town on the Syrian border. Two days earlier she had said on air that Turkish intelligence was accusing her of spying. Her family and her employer have always believed she was killed deliberately. Turkish authorities called those claims baseless, and no investigation has produced evidence of foul play.

More than a decade later her case is still cited as proof of a cover-up, and still dismissed by others as a tragic road accident. What follows sets out what is established, what is disputed, and what remains unknown.

Who was Serena Shim?

Shim was born on 10 October 1985 in Michigan to Lebanese immigrant parents and grew up in Dearborn and Livonia. After her parents divorced she moved to Lebanon, settling in her father’s home town of Bourj el-Barajneh in south Beirut, and studied at the American University of Technology.

She began working for Press TV in 2007, while still a student, and went on to report from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Ukraine and Turkey, including the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. She was married with two young children, a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, and was the family’s main earner.

Because she worked for an Iranian state channel, her reporting carried a clear editorial line, critical of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Western policy in Syria. That matters when weighing both her claims and the claims later made about her death.

Her final reports and the spying accusation

In autumn 2014 Shim was covering the siege of Kobanî, the Kurdish-held Syrian town just across the border from Suruç, which the so-called Islamic State had surrounded. On 17 October she told Press TV viewers that Turkish intelligence had accused her of being a spy and that she felt threatened. She said she was a little frightened, pointing out that Reporters Without Borders had described Turkey as the world’s biggest prison for journalists.

She also said she had seen militants crossing from Turkey into Syria in aid vehicles. In her words: I’ve got images of them in World Food Organization trucks. She appears to have meant the UN World Food Programme. Those images were never published, and her family says her belongings, including her equipment, were kept by the Turkish authorities after the crash.

Not everyone found the claim convincing. In November 2014 Alex Thomson of Britain’s Channel 4 News questioned whether her evidence showed anything more than bearded men in an aid truck, while still calling for a proper investigation into her death.

Shim’s last Press TV segment, recorded two days before her death, in which she describes the spying accusation and her concerns about her safety.

The crash near Suruç on 19 October 2014

Shim was returning to her hotel after an assignment, riding as a passenger in a rented car. According to her family, the driver was her 16-year-old cousin, Judy Irish; some reports described Irish as her camera operator. Turkish media reported a collision with a large cement mixer truck at a junction.

Accounts of how it happened differ sharply:

The truck driver said the car was travelling very fast, lost control, entered his lane and went under his truck.
Irish, who blacked out when the airbags deployed and suffered a broken nose, said in 2016 that the collision was not head-on. In her account, the truck sped up, cut her off and forced her into it.
The two women were taken to different hospitals. Irish went to Suruç State Hospital; Shim’s mother says her daughter was taken to a hospital more than two hours further away. Early reports said Shim died at the scene; later ones said she died of heart failure in hospital.

Turkish outlets gave her age as 30; by her date of birth she was 29. Small inconsistencies like these, repeated across early reports, fed the suspicion that something was being hidden.

Turkey’s investigation and the truck driver

On 20 October 2014 the newspaper Hürriyet reported that the truck driver had been arrested, without naming him. On the same day the governor of Şanlıurfa province, İzzettin Küçük, dismissed Press TV’s allegations as completely baseless and promised a full explanation once the investigation was complete. Meanwhile Press TV reported on 21 October that the driver’s identity and whereabouts were unknown, one source of the much-repeated claim that Turkey first said it could not find the truck.

An official report obtained by Hürriyet on 24 October named the driver as Şükrü Salan and found him not responsible, blaming the car for entering the junction too fast and turning against traffic rules. Salan was detained and then released. In December 2014 Turkish papers reported that, despite two reports clearing him, the Suruç public prosecutor was seeking two to six years in prison for manslaughter, with a first hearing set for March 2015. The outcome of that case is not clearly documented in English-language sources.

After an autopsy in Şanlıurfa, Shim’s body was flown to Beirut on 22 October and buried the same day in Bourj el-Barajneh, with hundreds of mourners attending.

Why her family and Press TV suspect foul play

Shim’s mother, Judy Poe, saw her daughter’s body in a Beirut morgue and said there was not a mark on her. She has said she absolutely suspects foul play and believes the scene may have been staged. Her sister Fatmeh has said she believes Serena was assassinated. The family also says no photographs showed Shim in the car, and that the car in the crash photos was not the one they rented.

Press TV’s news director called the death highly suspicious and linked it to her reporting on Turkish and Saudi policy toward Syria. A commentator on the channel went further and accused the Turkish government of killing her. No evidence was offered for that claim.

The family also felt abandoned by Washington. Shim’s mother said neither the US State Department nor the Turkish government contacted her. The State Department told Fox News in November 2014 that it does not investigate deaths overseas but monitors such cases closely. In November 2016 the family renewed its call for a US investigation.

One claim often attached to this story is that no major US outlet covered her death. That is not accurate: Fox News and BuzzFeed News both reported on it, and press-freedom groups looked into the case. Coverage was, however, far smaller than for American journalists killed by the Islamic State the same year.

The wider context: Turkey’s border and press freedom

Shim’s claims did not come from nowhere. In 2014 Turkey’s long border with Syria was a major route for foreign fighters joining extremist groups. At a Harvard event on 2 October 2014, US Vice-President Joe Biden said that America’s regional allies, Turkey among them, had allowed fighters and money to flow into Syria; he apologised to President Erdoğan within days. Turkey was also, as Shim noted, one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists.

That context makes her fears understandable. It does not, on its own, prove that her death was planned. Supporters of the murder theory sometimes point to the American journalist Michael Hastings, who died in a car crash in Los Angeles in 2013 a day after emailing colleagues that he believed the FBI was investigating him, which the FBI denied; the coroner ruled his death an accident. Such parallels feel striking, but they are not evidence.

What can be said with confidence

Several things are clear. Shim was a working journalist who reported being threatened by a state intelligence service two days before she died. The official account of the crash changed in its details, and her family has never been given answers that satisfy them. Turkey’s own prosecutor did not simply close the case, but sought to charge the truck driver.

Other things remain unproven. There is no public evidence that the collision was deliberate, that her footage showed what she said it did, or that it was taken to silence her. The International Federation of Journalists listed her among the accidental deaths of media workers in 2014, and the International Press Institute records the case without any finding of a killing.

Shim is remembered at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, and a journalism award bears her name, given by a group that supports the Syrian government. Whatever the truth of the crash, her story is a reminder of how exposed reporters are on the edges of war, and of why independent investigations into journalists’ deaths matter.

Sources: Wikipedia: Serena Shim; International Press Institute: Serena Shim, Turkey; Wikipedia: Michael Hastings (journalist); video: Press TV, via YouTube.

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