The Times Wins 3 Awards From Journalism Group

The Los Angeles Times has been awarded three prizes in the Society of Professional Journalists’ 1996 competition--including an award to cartoonist Paul Conrad, now a seven-time winner who holds the organization’s record for individual winners.

Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg won a foreign correspondence award for his reporting on Afghanistan, and a Times investigative team won the non-deadline reporting award for “And Justice for Some: Solving Murders in L.A. County.”

That award, which went to Ted Rohrlich, Fredric N. Tulsky, Richard O’Reilly, Patrick Downs and Tim Reiterman, cited The Times’ 20-month study of how the local justice system deals with the 2,000 homicides that take place in Los Angeles County each year.

Dahlburg’s series of reports on Afghanistan chronicled how hostilities in that region have fueled a global network of terrorists and exported thousands of trained militants around the world. Other stories described an Internet and fax machine link between loosely organized terrorist groups.

“We are honored by the society’s awards,” said Times Editor and Executive Vice President Shelby Coffey III. “They show the range of the paper, from the most vital of hometown issues--how the local justice system works--to the critical global issues of terror in the post-Cold War world. And Paul Conrad is a perpetual winner. It’s a pleasure to have strong work acknowledged by our peers in journalism.”