Friday, April 25, 2008

Washington Post foreign correspondent Steve Fainaru was awarded the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award, which recognizes "the best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad," at a banquet in New York on Thursday evening.

The award was given in recognition of Fainaru's reporting on private security contractors in Iraq.

Fainaru's articles documented a parallel war, in which private guards sometimes killed or injured civilians with impunity. He also showed how U.S. authorities had failed to act on numerous warnings about the guards' conduct.

Fainaru, 46, was also awarded this year's Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his work on private security contractors in Iraq.

Fainaru has been a Post staff writer since 2000. He is a native of Mountain View, Calif., and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.