then again in 2004, operating freely as a journalist, traveling through the country without so much as a cell phone, interviewing the local populace, observing the reality of life on the ground. In 2004, he would publish In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq, as well as a blog about his travels. Vincent returned to Iraq in April 2005, this time to the south, basing himself in Basra as the only Western journalist in the region. Initially he pursued stories such as the reconstruction of the marshlands drained by Saddam Hussein, but in the process of meeting and speaking to locals on all levels, from people in the street to government officials, he uncovered and began investigating reports of Iran's growing logistical and financial support for the local insurgency and the unchecked movement over the border of Iranian agents, drug smuggling to support the area's militias, the killing of Basra's Christian populace, increasing corruption and violence in the local police force and the inexplicable unwillingness of the British forces stationed there to address such dangerous issues. Death On August 2, 2005, three months to the day after he had arrived, Vincent and his translator Nouriya Itais Wadi went to a Basra money exchange after spending the day doing interviews; when they came back out, they were kidnapped off the street in broad daylight by men in police uniforms driving a white police truck. They were bound, gagged, taken to an undisclosed location where for five hours they were beaten and interrogated, then taken to the outskirts of town and shot. They were found by British and Iraqi policemen but Vincent was dead, shot in the back at close range. Wadi survived despite having been shot three times, since she was farther from the truck when the men opened fire. It is generally accepted that Vincent was murdered because of his criticism of religious extremism in the area, expressed three days before his murder in "Switched Off in Basra", a July 31 op-ed for The New York Times, in which he noted the increasing infiltration of the Basra police force by Islamic extremists loyal to Muqtada al Sadr. Vincent is buried in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery; his widow, Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, to whom he was married from 1992 until his death, still lives in Manhattan. They had lived together in the East Village. Two months after Vincent's murder, she