A recent study of the journalistic career of the award-winning BBC war correspondent, Rageh Omaar, has revealed that he has spent more than three-quarters of his entire life, broadcasting from flat rooftops in various trouble spots around the world.
Omaar, 55, made his name as a respected and fearless journalist reporting from a Kuwaiti rooftop during the first Gulf war in 1990 when he spent ninety-six days on a roof with only three cans of Red Bull and a pack of tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches, that were made for him by his mother before he left, to sustain him.
Since then, he has stood on rooftops with artillery fire raining down on neighbouring buildings in various warzones across the planet, including, Syria, Yemen, Chechnya, Sierra Leonne, and more recently Mariupol in Ukraine, where he has been on the flat roof of a bombed-out building for 13-days with only a handheld camera and a small cassette recorder, on which he records the latest Russian air and artillery strikes for the BBC and the Al Jazeera television station.
In 2010, Omaar split from his wife of 12-years who cited his constant demands for food and water to be brought up to him on the roof of their home in Milton Keynes as grounds for divorce.
'He was rooftop mad' she told The Sunday Times.
'We even spent our honeymoon night in Praia Del Ingles in Portugal on the roof where he insisted on a cameraman being present while we had sex in case a Warsaw Pact country launched an airstrike on our hotel.'
Only the legendary BBC war correspondent, Kate Adie, can match Omaar's dogged record in world trouble spots.
Last year, it was revealed that Adie has spent her entire life, from the age of nineteen, in warzones, crouching down on her haunches wearing army fatigues and shouting into a microphone as various bombs, missiles, and even improvised explosive devices, explode in the background.
