Steffen Hegelund Knudsen was a Danish citizen and was originally a
trained gardener but moved to Central America in the 1980s. He lived in
Central and South America for a number of years, working for several
aid organizations as well as having numerous other positions. The time
in here made him fluent in Spanish.
During the siege of the Japanese embassy in Lima in 1996, he was
recruited by Danish state television channel DR1 as an on-site
reporter, covering the event hour by hour. This led to a permanent job
at DR1 and he moved back to Denmark.
Steffen Hegelund Knudsen's preferred field of work was international
politics and armed conflicts around the globe. As one of only a handful
of European reporters, he was an embedded reporter during Operation
Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Here he was embedded in the US 101st Combat
Aviation Brigade and reported from airlifted nocturnal air raids deep
into enemy territory.
Steffen Hegelund Knudsen always sought to process and present facts in
a simplistic, impartial, and non-sensational way. At the time that he
was diagnosed fatally ill from ALS disease, at the age of 43, he was in
the process of making Egyptian Arabic his third native language in
order to better convey news and facts in an independent manner.
