Sandy Gall

The newsreader and foreign correspondent was an old-style adventurer with a particular love of Afghanistan

- Patrick Kidd

Only a "very odd person" should enjoy working as a war reporter, said Sandy Gall, one of the finest. "You are just there to tell a story," he said. "War is bloody dangerous." It was a risk he was prepared to face time and again in a long broadcasting career, notably in Afghanistan during the Soviet Union's decade-long invasion in the 1980s.

In 1982 he spent three months trekking across the mountainous country, avoiding bandits and landmines, and living off boiled goat, in order to get to know Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of the Panjshir Valley", whose mujahideen were fighting a dogged resistance. "I was aware of an aura, a mystique that set him apart," Gall wrote of this 28-year-old commander.

Soon after he arrived in one village, it was bombed by Soviet aircraft, killing 20 people. It would have been the first footage of Russians at war for decades, Gall said, but, having sent the camera equipment by mules, he had to recreate the attack for his dispatch using photographs and archive sound effects. "With that went the chance of winning any prizes."

Gall returned again and again to broadcast from a war that most of the world was ignoring. He came to love the country, which he said reminded him of Scotland only without whisky. In 1983, wishing to help one of Massoud's commanders who had lost a foot on a landmine, he founded a charity providing prosthetics and physiotherapy for those maimed in the conflict.