By TED ANTHONY
AP National Writer

His death Wednesday in West Africa — at the hands of the same Sierra Leone rebel group that killed his Associated Press Television News colleague, Myles Tierney, little more than a year ago — ended a brief but astonishingly full journalism career that carried him to the planet's bleakest pockets.

It was something the 32-year-old cameraman saw as a calling.

"He felt it was his responsibility to show the world the people who are suffering. And he suffered if he couldn't show that," said Tim Sullivan, AP's West Africa bureau chief, who was reporting elsewhere in Sierra Leone when Gil Moreno de Mora was killed. The two often worked together covering African conflicts.

Colleagues rarely struggled for adjectives — before or after Gil Moreno de Mora died. Cool-headed. Deeply religious. Soothing. Intense. Generous without any reason. "A big man — big of heart," said Madrid-based AP photographer Santiago Lyon. "Single-minded," said AP Nairobi bureau chief Susan Linnee. "One of the most intelligent cameramen of his generation," said APTN head of news Nigel Baker.

"The corporate lawyer who roared into Sarajevo on a motorbike, and with it transformed his life and the lives of everybody he touched thereafter," remembered APTN Managing Editor Sandy MacIntyre in London.

Gil Moreno de Mora was renowned for his versatility — no small matter in an Information Age industry that demands more of it than ever. At the AP, a news cooperative whose stock-in-trade is not only words and images and sounds but technology and versatility as well, Gil Moreno de Mora was that most valuable of employees — the guy who could do pretty much everything, and do it well.

"One time, Miguel said the camera could be his forehead, and he could just put all his concentration into what he was doing," Linnee said. "He would have said that the story was much more important than him, that he was a vehicle to get people to pay attention."

Though a cameraman (and initially a radio stringer as well), Gil Moreno de Mora also loved writing. On Monday, his reporting of possible U.N. peacekeeper bodies found east of the Sierra Leone capital earned him a byline on the AP newspaper wires — a rarity for a cameraman, but something he had done in Chechnya and the former Zaire.

The story appeared Tuesday in major newspapers around the world. Gil Moreno de Mora was excited, and asked AP writers in Freetown to find out where it ran.

Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora's life was not the kind many would seek — or even understand.

He was a young corporate lawyer from Spain who decided, somewhat abruptly, to become a journalist. One day in late 1994, Gil Moreno de Mora came to the AP office in Sarajevo on his motorcycle and asked if there were any videotapes he could ferry out. He stuck around, and eventually worked with senior producer Mike Sposito and Sarajevo staff cameraman Eldar Emric to learn the ropes.

He had nowhere to stay and nothing to eat, so AP staffers let him sleep under a desk. "Slowly he became something like an inventory item," said Sarajevo AP staffer Aida Cerkez-Robinson. "We fed him with parts of portions we received. Later I discovered he shared that food with children in the neighborhood which I had already fed that day, so the children ended up with more food then what Miguel and I consumed."

Gil Moreno de Mora became the one who crossed the lines, who worked with Bosnian Muslim TV crews on one side and Bosnian Serb crews on the other. He went on to follow reports of atrocities in Srebrenica. He would regularly cross the dangerous Mount Igman pass that connected Sarajevo with the outside world, shuttling AP staffers in and out.

One day, toward the end of that war, he hadn't seen MacIntyre and Sposito for a long time. On a rare day off, he rose early and drove 14 hours to Tuzla to see them. "He spent an hour with us, had a cup of coffee and drove back," MacIntyre said.

As Gil Moreno de Mora's resume grew, so did his reputation — for grace under fire and for thoughtful decision-making.

"He exuded a certain calmness that people picked up on, that made them feel safer," Lyon says. "Even when things were really ugly, Miguel would always be focused and concentrated, with his camera up to his eye when it needed to be and down by his side when it needed to be."

He covered Zaire, later Congo, and other African violence. In Kosovo last year, competitors viewed him as "the guy who always came back with the pictures." When the NATO bombing began, he persuaded Serb authorities in Pristina that he should be allowed to remain. "What if your television station is bombed and you have no way to tell your story?" he asked.

The Serbs let him stay. And when other reporters tried to stay as well, he worried they were in danger — and offered to share his footage so they could leave without guilt.

Madrid-based AP writer Adam Brown remembers when he, Gil Moreno de Mora and a Spanish photographer were heading into a town being shelled by Serbs. Suddenly, Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas jumped onto the road and began shooting into the vehicle. The journalists hit the floor; when they came up, hands raised, the head guerrilla, Abi Berisha, was aiming a rocket launcher at them. "We were all sure we were going to die," Brown says.

But then the guerrillas realized the three were journalists, not enemies. Berisha, says Brown, was so upset that he broke down in tears. Gil Moreno de Mora walked over, put his arm around Berisha and slapped him on the back. "No problem," the cameraman said. "Just calm down."

"That was Miguel," Brown says. On Friday, the old KLA command said it planned to send condolences to Gil Moreno de Mora's family in Spain.

Lyon remembers being pinned in a Kosovo cornfield with Gil Moreno de Mora, who shot footage that would later win Britain's Rory Peck Award. And when it came time to accept the award, Gil Moreno de Mora was reluctant to leave the story. "But his bosses wanted him to go," Lyon remembers. "So he put on a tuxedo, received the prize and then went back to work."

Gil Moreno de Mora was deeply affected when Tierney, his friend, colleague and good-natured rival, was killed in Sierra Leone in January 1999. "Myles understood people in pain," he said at a New York memorial service. "He cared for them because each was an individual to him."

"Though he might never say it in as many words, he felt guilt at Myles' death," MacIntyre said. "He felt perhaps he should have been there. There was guilt there. There was no reason for it, but it was there."

Later last year, Gil Moreno de Mora went to Chechnya and petitioned Chechen rebels to allow him behind their lines — again using his lawyerly skills of persuasion. Again, it worked. His footage helped shape the world's view of that troubled region's second war in five years.

Just weeks after he received the 1999 Royal Television Society's cameraman of the year award in Britain for his work in Kosovo, Gil Moreno de Mora was in Sierra Leone. Not surprising: The situation was getting bad again.

On Wednesday, he was with three Reuters journalists — correspondent Kurt Schork, photographer Yannis Behrakis and cameraman Mark Chisholm — when they were ambushed near Rogberi Junction, 54 miles east of Freetown. Behrakis, in a first-person account for Reuters, said armed men in T-shirts jumped up from the roadside and began shooting. He saw Schork get shot in the head, then saw Gil Moreno de Mora's car being hit before he escaped into the bush.

Both Schork and Gil Moreno de Mora were killed.

"In the end I find solace in the fact that Miguel was doing the job he loved and died doing the work he felt ordained for," said Gil Moreno de Mora's mother, Maria de Patrocinio Macian Blaya. "He felt his mission was to give voice to those who did not have one."

In Spain, where Gil Moreno de Mora was something of a celebrity, the newspaper El Mundo on Friday ran an editorial tribute to him called "Death of a Journalist." It lauded the efforts of those who report on human suffering.

"One could think that those millions of defenseless beings have no hope. But the words and the images that journalists in the midst of the horror bring to us do more than transmit a moving reality. They elicit a personal and collective solidarity that ... can alleviate the suffering and save lives," El Mundo said.

In a society where some communications media convert reality into a spectacle, the editorial said, journalists like Gil Moreno de Mora "ennoble the profession and provide a high ethical example. Miguel Gil has paid very dearly for his vocation of truth."

And in Kosovo, Koha Ditore, Pristina's most prominent newspaper, devoted its entire front page Friday to the deaths. "We found out about what was happening in the villages around Pristina through Miguel's camera," Koha publisher Veton Surroi said.

Surviving are his mother, a brother and a sister. Colleagues were gathering this weekend for a Roman Catholic funeral in Barcelona, Spain, where he will be buried at a monastery. "In some ways," MacIntyre said, "he was a missionary with a camera."

"Miguel never stopped being a lawyer," Cerkez-Robinson said. "Only now he represented Les Miserables in front of the public, talking on behalf of them about their misery that was imposed on them without their will and guilt."

Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora is the 25th AP journalist to die on duty since the organization was founded in 1848.

"He wasn't infallible. I think he would have liked to have been," Linnee says. "He was kind of like this pure essence that burned. Maybe he just kind of burned himself out. Maybe he was just consumed."