ABC Pulls News Crew Out of Sarajevo : Television: Producer David Kaplan is the first American journalist to be killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict.

ABC News had decided in mid-July that Sarajevo was too dangerous to send its reporters, and was working with a British free-lance journalist there instead, when the opportunity came up for producer David Kaplan and correspondent Sam Donaldson to travel into the war-ravaged city with the prime minister of Yugoslavia.

The decision to send an ABC contingent--who were traveling with Prime Minister Milan Panic to United Nations regional headquarters for peace talks--cost Kaplan his life Thursday, and stunned fellow journalists.

“Sam (Donaldson) was offered by the Serbian prime minister to go in with him for these talks,” said Joanna Bistany, vice president and assistant to the president of ABC News. “There was some discussion and it was decided that they could go. . . . The feeling was that they would be with the prime minister, that they would be in a protected situation.”

Kaplan was shot in the stomach in an area of Sarajevo known as Sniper Alley, on the way into town from Sarajevo airport. He was the 25th journalist--although the first American journalist--to be killed in the region since the Yugoslav Federation disintegrated into civil war in June, 1991, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organization that tracks journalists’ deaths. Others have put the number of journalists killed at 30.

In the wake of the killing, ABC and CBS said that they will stick to their informal practice of stationing reporters in Belgrade, the Serbian capital and the capital of the former Yugoslav federation, while relying on free-lancers and pool reports from Sarajevo.

“It (Kaplan’s death) just gives me pause, because on a daily basis we deal with the safety of our employees on assignments like Yugoslavia, Baghdad, Beruit,” said Joe Peyronnin, vice president and assistant to the president of CBS News. “It just reminds us how vulnerable we are, even though we do have a press pass on and we think we can go anywhere.”

Immediately after the shooting, ABC pulled Donaldson, producer Ben Sherwood, soundman Dave Calvert and cameraman Doug Vogt out of the city, sending them instead to Belgrade in what’s left of the former Yugoslavian federation, to report for “PrimeTime Live,” Bistany said.

CNN, however, said that it will keep reporter Christine Amanpour in the city. And decisions on whether NBC reporter Rick Davis and his crew will remain in Sarajevo are being made “on a day-to-day basis,” according to network spokeswoman Peggy Hubble.

“What we do for a living is cover war zones and combat areas,” Hubble said. “Our practice is that the people on site have to judge what’s best in terms of safety.”

At CNN, where reporters are rotated in and out of Sarajevo periodically, Amanpour was brought in to replace Stefan Kotsonis, who was trapped there for a period last month when planes temporarily stopped flying into Sarajevo airport, CNN spokesman Sven Haaroff said.

All CNN personnel in Sarajevo are there on a voluntary basis, Haaroff said, and the cable network carries war insurance to cover potential injuries. One CNN camerawoman, Margaret Moth, was shot in the face last month in Sarajevo, and is currently undergoing reconstructive surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Haaroff said.

“It’s tough on this end,” Haaroff said, even though the people on the story have volunteered to go. “When Margaret got shot, people were really shaken up, because it’s one of your own. People feel the same now with Kaplan.”