Reuters journalist Maria Golovnina dies in Pakistan aged 34

LONDON (Reuters) - Maria Golovnina, Reuters bureau chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan who was widely loved and admired for her courage, compassion and professionalism, died in Islamabad on Monday.

Maria, 34, was found collapsed and unconscious in the bureau and was rushed to hospital, but medical teams were unable to save her.

In a career spanning more than a decade with Reuters, Maria was always on the move, reporting from some of the world's most dangerous places with a calm authority that other, more experienced journalists could only admire.

She was driven by a hunger to understand what made human beings tick, be it during the throes of revolution in Libya or in the pre-dawn calm of southern Pakistan as Sufis cleansed a revered shrine with rose water before their ecstatic rituals began.

As friend and colleague Peter Graff put it: "Empathy wasn't just a skill she deployed for her craft. It burned in her white hot. It is what sustained her legendary stamina for work, play and learning."

The daughter of Russian expatriates, raised in Japan and writing in her third language, English, Maria joined Reuters in Tokyo in 2001 and subsequently worked in London, Singapore and Seoul as part of the graduate trainee program.

She was posted to Russia from 2002 to 2005, where she covered the early years of the Putin presidency, the Moscow theater siege and a spate of bomb attacks by Chechen rebels across the region.

She became Chief Correspondent in Central Asia, in 2005, reporting on Uzbekistan's crackdown on opposition protests, Kyrgyzstan's revolutions and instability in Tajikistan.

Maria did a stint in Afghanistan during the 2009 presidential election and later went on assignment to Iraq. Her eye for telling details helped her to build understated yet powerful accounts of complicated and distressing events.

She moved to the London editing desk in 2010, where fellow editors remember her as an open, engagi