This public criticism came amid attacks on Al Jazeera from US forces, including the shelling of a hotel in Basra on 8 April 2003 used solely by the channel's correspondents.[20] Nearly a week later, US forces bombed the station's Baghdad offices wounding one cameraman and killing a correspondent, Tariq Ayoub[2][21] on the same day that two Reuters journalists were killed when a US tank shell struck their office in the Palestine Hotel. In July, Khanfar wrote an open letter to Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq responding to his assertion that television stations or newspapers guilty of "incitement to violence" would be shut down.[19] Khanfar wrote that his offices and staff had been subject to "strafing by gunfire, death threats, confiscation of news material, and multiple detentions and arrests, all carried out by US soldiers", asserting that the channel's coverage had been consistently harassed for unfavourable reporting during the Ba'athist regime.[19] He also said that because Al Jazeera at that time was only available in Arabic, reliance on the channel's coverage came "from second-, third- and fourth-hand sources – half-truths and total falsehoods that make the rounds in Washington, Baghdad and elsewhere."[22]