Photographer who took Aylan pictures recalls her 'shock and sorrow'
The photographer who shot the haunting images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi on a beach in Turkey has spoken of feeling "petrified" when she saw his body.
Nilufer Demir, a correspondent and photographer with Turkey’s Dogan News Agency, tweeted: “Tomé la foto para mostrar la tragedia” (I took the picture to show the tragedy).
“At that moment, when I saw the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, I was petrified,” Hurriyet Daily News reports.
Aylan, his five-year-old brother Galip and the boys' mother were all killed while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Their bodies washed ashore on Bodrum’s Akyarlar coast of Turkey’s Mugla province.
Demir said: "Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi was lying lifeless face down in the surf, in his red t-shirt and dark blue shorts folded to his waist. The only thing I could do was to make his outcry heard."
She said she was on duty on Wednesday and had been photographing a group of Pakistani migrants trying to make the crossing to Greece.
"While witnessing the tragedy, suddenly we noticed the lying, lifeless bodies (and) recognized the bodies belonged to toddlers," she said.
"We were shocked; we felt sorrow for them. The best thing to do was to make this tragedy heard."
CNN reported that Demir, 29, has worked for Dogan News Agency, also known as DHA, since she was a teenager and has been covering the refugee crisis for months and has photographed many dead migrants.
