A former BBC journalist found hanged at an airport in Turkey had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had lost friends to recent terrorist attacks.
Jacky Sutton, director in Iraq for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), a non-profit organisation that works with local journalists, missed a connecting flight from Istanbul Ataturk airport on Saturday. She had arrived on a Turkish Airlines flight from London and was due to fly to Arbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
She is reported to have become upset when she was told she would have to buy another ticket to take a later flight. Her body was found in a lavatory in the international departure lounge.
Ataturk airport has handed over CCTV footage to the Turkish authorities, who say that they believe Ms Sutton hanged herself. Her colleagues at the IWPR are calling for an international investigation, saying that the circumstances are suspicious.
Charlie Winter, a researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, the anti-extremism think tank, said that Ms Sutton had seemed excited about future projects when he met her in London last week. “I didn’t get any impression that she was depressed or suicidal,” he said. “She spoke a lot about . . . her plans in Iraq. We had pencilled in another meeting for before Christmas.”
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Mazin Elias, an Iraqi journalist who worked with Ms Sutton in Baghdad, said: “She spent her time helping people to have a better life. People like that don’t kill themselves.”
Ms Sutton, aged 50, who was divorced with no children, had been based in Iraq since 2007 and had previously worked with the BBC World Service and the UN development programme.
She had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in the 1990s after working for five years in Eritrea. She had been arrested and deported after the government accused her of being a spy.
More recently she told friends she was worried about being targeted by Isis for her work in Iraq. She took over her role in June after her predecessor, Ammar Al Shahbander, was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad. She had been in London to attend a memorial service to him.
Anthony Borden, executive director of the IWPR, said: “Jacky was extremely bright, highly competent, and well able to handle herself in difficult environments, and she was universally loved. We are in total shock.”