MILAN, Italy (AP) - Maria Grazia Cutuli, one of four journalists killed in an 
ambush in Afghanistan Monday, took every opportunity to go where it was ``no 
place for a woman.'' She was 39. 

Her colleagues said she did her job passionately, volunteering to cover wars 
during her vacations. 

Cutuli began her career in her native Sicily, writing for the newspaper La 
Sicilia. She quickly moved to nationwide publications, covering conflicts in 
Africa and other places for the Italian weekly magazine Epoca. 

She joined Corriere della Sera, the respected Italian daily, in 1997 on its 
foreign news desk, and after a little more than a year, was sent abroad. 

Cutuli was killed the same day Corriere ran a story in which she reported the 
discovery of vials in a box marked ``sarin,'' the nerve gas, in a camp 
believed to have been abandoned by Osama bin Laden. 

She had been in the Afghanistan region since shortly after the Sept. 11 
attacks in the United States