Son accused of killing British war photographer father pleads not guilty

A 20-year-old man has denied killing his British photojournalist father at a hiking trail in California.

Paul Lowe, who covered conflicts including the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, was pronounced dead on October 12 in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Mr Lowe died from a stab wound to the neck, according to the County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s office.

His son, Emir Abadzic Lowe, who turned 20 last week, has appeared at the West Covina Courthouse in Los Angeles where he pleaded not guilty to a charge of murder.

The dark-haired, bearded man, wearing a standardised yellow jumpsuit, will next appear in court on February 13, Judge Rob Villeza ruled.

He held his head down as he was escorted out of the courtroom and back into custody.

Abadzic Lowe faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in state prison if he is convicted as charged.

According to police, the incident around Mr Lowe’s death happened at 3.28pm at Mount Baldy Road, near Stoddard Canyon Falls.

A statement from the sheriff’s department said officers responding to a call about an assault with a deadly weapon found a “white male adult suffering trauma to his upper torso”.

“San Bernardino Fire Department personnel responded and pronounced the victim dead at the scene,” it added.

“A white male adult was seen driving away from the scene and was subsequently involved in a solo traffic collision a few miles away. The male was detained pending further investigation.”

Officials from the San Bernardino Fire Department were called to the scene by a passer-by, a statement from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said.

Mr Lowe was a professor at the University of the Arts London, a visiting professor in war studies at King’s College London (KCL) and taught at an academy through the VII Foundation, which trains emerging visual journalists from communities underrepresented in the media.

The foundation described Mr Lowe as a “courageous and beloved comrade, and a deeply devoted father and husband”, while KCL said the award-winning photojournalist would be “deeply missed”.

Mr Lowe, who wrote several books about his war reporting, told The Guardian in 2022 that he “became preoccupied with what happens to ordinary, educated, cultured people when they’re reduced to the medieval conditions caused by a siege” when he was in Sarajevo.

“People would risk their lives for a little pleasure,” he told the newspaper. “And it could be very hard on kids, who obviously didn’t want to be stuck indoors.

“During quieter periods, they were able to go outside more — I took a picture of children swimming in the river during a ceasefire. But the river, like so much of the city, was clearly visible to Serbian snipers.

“One winter, I attended an awful scene: a group of five or six children had been killed by a shell while sledging in front of their house.”