Sri Lanka born BBC journalist George Alagiah dies-by Tina Edward Gunawardhana

Sri Lankan-born British journalist George Alagiah passed away in the early hours of Monday in the UK.

Alagiah who was 67 years at the time of his death was a much-respected journalist.. He was the face of BBC One’s News at Six since 2007, prior to that he co-hosted the show with Natasha Kaplinsky since 2003. Diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in 2014 Alagiah latterly revealed the cancer had spread to his liver and lymph nodes.

During his stellar career, he also presented other shows such as Mixed Britannia which looked at Britain’s mixed-race population. Before becoming a news presenter he was a prominent foreign correspondent covering Africa, the continent where he moved to when his parents did not feel safe in Sri Lanka. The award-winning journalist has interviewed political leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Desmon Tutu and Robert Mugage amongst others.

Alagiah won awards for reports on the famine and war in Somalia in the early 1990s, and was nominated for a Bafta in 1994 for covering Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq.

He was also named Amnesty International’s journalist of the year in 1994, for reporting on the civil war in Burundi, and was the first BBC journalist to report on the genocide in Rwanda.

George Maxwell Alagiah was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka before moving to Ghana and then England in childhood.