New Delhi, Oct 19 (IANS): Aman Sethi of The Hindu Wednesday won the first prize of Rs.50,000 in the Humanitarian Reporting awards instituted by the ICRC and the Press Institute of India (PII).

Umar Baba of Tehelka magazine, Reji Joseph of Rashtriya Deepika, a Malayalam newspaper, and Anup Sharma, then of the Times of India, bagged the second, third and consolation prizes respectively.

Wajahat Habibullah, chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, gave away the prizes along with PII chief V. Murali and Francois Stamm, the India head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Sethi was picked for his expose of the rights abuses that took place in tribal areas of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh in March this year, leaving six people dead, three sexually assaulted and three villages aflame.

While Baba Umar detailed rights abuses in the Kashmir Valley, Joseph forayed into Tamil refugee camps in Sri Lanka claiming to be a Red Cross worker to report on the conditions there.

Sharma wrote a probing four-part series on the victims of ethnic clashes in Assam.

The jury which picked the winners included human rights lawyer Vrinda Grover, Jawaharlal Nehru University's Anuradha Chenoy and IANS Executive Editor M.R. Narayan Swamy.