Maria Golovnina (Russian: Мария Васильевна Головнина; 4 June 1980 – 23 February 2015), was a Japanese-Russian journalist, best known for her reporting in Central Asia, being the Reuters bureau chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for the circumstances of her death.
[4] In 2011, she traveled to Tripoli to cover the Libyan Civil War,[4] where she was a part of the team that received Reuters' first Pulitzer Prize nomination in its history.
[5] In 2010 Golovnina saved the life of Reuters’ photographer Shamil Zhumatov in Kyrgyzstan, who had been attacked and beaten by a crowd of protesters in the central square of Bishkek.
[1][6] In 2015, Golovnina was found unconscious in the bathroom of her office in Islamabad, after reporting that she felt sick to her stomach, and was rushed to hospital but died on the way, at the age of 34.
[4] Preliminary autopsy findings at the Pakistan Institute for Medical Sciences concluded that she died of asphyxiation due to a blockage in her upper respiratory tract.