His speech came only hours before Al Jazeera was ejected from Baghdad by the US occupation. A top secret memo leaked by a British civil servant and a parliamentary researcher detailed a lengthy conversation on April 16, 2004 between Prime Minister Blair and President Bush, in which Bush according to British media allegedly proposed bombing the Qatar central office of Al Jazeera. House press secretary, Scott McClellan, describing it as "outlandish" said, "Any such notion that we would engage in that kind of activity is just absurd." A UK government official suggested that the Bush threat had been "humorous, not serious." Another source said Bush was "deadly serious." The UK government refuses to publish the memo and two civil servants have been charged with violating Britain's Official Secrets Act for allegedly disclosing the document. For a more full discussion, see Al Jazeera bombing memo. On the same day as the destruction of the Baghdad bureau of Al Jazeera, a U.S. tank fired a HEAT round at what the U.S. military later said was a suspected Iraqi forward artillery observer. Due to what the U.S. states was a communications error, the tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, where approximately 100 international reporters in Baghdad were based, instead of the correct building, killing two journalists, Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecinco and wounding three other correspondents. After interviewing "about a dozen reporters who were at the scene, including two embedded journalists who monitored the military radio traffic before and after the shelling occurred" the Committee to Protect Journalists said the facts suggested "that attack on the journalists, while not deliberate, was avoidable." The Committee to Protect Journalists went on to say that "Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists and were intent on not hitting it". It is not clear that orders not to fire upon the hotel had actually made it to the tank level. Reporters Without Borders demanded proof from Donald Rumsfeld that incidents "were not deliberate attempts to dissuade the media from reporting." Amnesty International demanded independent investigation. There were a number of journalist casualties during the invasion, including fourteen deaths (some not directly war-related). Michael Kelly, an influential reporter, columnist, and editor, died in a Humvee accident on April 3, 2003. NBC's David Bloom died of a blood clot three days later. Both Kelly and Bloom were embedded with the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division. ITN reporter Terry Lloyd, who originally broke the news that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons, was killed by US forces near Basra on March 22, 2003.