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Paris: US attacks on a Baghdad hotel housing foreign journalists and on the office of an Arab television station were war crimes, the head of the international journalists' watchdog group Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) charged.

"Seeing an American tank firing at the Palestine Hotel and Americans hitting Al-Jazeera television, we're no longer talking professional risks. These are war crimes," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard on May 3.

Two journalists were killed on April 8 by a tank round fired into an upper floor of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel where foreign correspondents were based, and an Al-Jazeera correspondent was killed in a separate missile attack on the Arabic news network's offices in downtown Baghdad the same day.

Indian journalist Satish Jacob of Doordarshan, who was also staying in Palestine Hotel, had a narrow escape.

The US troops claimed they fired on the hotel after being targetted by Iraqi gunmen who had taken refuge in the hotel. This has been denied by journalists present at the scene.

The US-led war was "relatively more deadly for the journalists than for the troops in the Anglo-American force", Menard said.

He said the Americans had violated the Geneva Convention, under which journalists count as civilians in wartime and cannot become targets.

"But we're not trying to equate the USA, a great Democracy, with Saddam Hussein's regime which executed 500 journalists and intellectuals between 1979 and 2003, he added.