FLASHBACK Part II: The greatest news photos since 1986

The World Press Photo Awards are considered to be the most prestigious awards in the field of photojournalism. Since 1955, World Press Photo has honoured photographers who have chronicled the most moving as well as memorable moments of history, politics and conflict.

Rediff.com brings you a montage of the unforgettable photographs from the archives of World Press Photo, a collection of beautiful images that catch history in the making.

In the first part of the series, we brought you breathtaking photographs that won the World Press Photo Contest from 1955 to 1986.

Warning: Some of the photographs are violent or graphic in nature.

Year: 1985

Photograph: Frank Fournier

Image: Omaira Sanchez, 12, is trapped in the debris caused by the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia. After 60 hours, she eventually lost consciousness and died of a heart attack.

FLASHBACK Part I: The greatest news photos since 1956

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Year: 1986

Photograph: Alon Reininger

Image: Ken Meeks', 42, skin is marked with lesions caused by AIDS-related Kaposi's Sarcoma.

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Year: 1987

Photograph: Anthony Suau

Image: A mother clings to a riot policeman's shield at a polling station in South Korea. Her son was one of thousands of demonstrators arrested because they tried to prove that the presidential election on December 15, which was won by the government candidate, had been rigged.

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Year: 1988

Photograph: David Turnley

Image: Boris Abgarzian grieves for his 17-year-old son, victim of the Armenian earthquake.

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Year: 1989

Photograph: Charlie Cole

Image: A demonstrator confronts a line of People's Liberation Army tanks during protests for democratic reform in Beijing, China.

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Year: 1990

Photograph: Georges Merillon

Image: Family and neighbours mourn the death of Elshani Nashim, 27, killed during a protest against the Yugoslavian government's decision to abolish the autonomy of Kosovo.

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Year: 1991

Photograph: David Turnley

Image: US Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz, 23, gives vent to his grief as he learns that the body bag at his feet contains the remains of his friend Andy Alaniz.

'Friendly fire' claimed Alaniz's life and injured Kozakiewicz. On the last day of the Gulf War they were taken away from the war zone by a MASH unit evacuation helicopter.

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Year: 1992

Photograph: James Nachtwey

Image: A mother carries her dead child to the grave, after wrapping it in a shroud according to local custom. A bad drought coupled with the effects of civil war caused a terrible famine in Somalia, which claimed the lives of between one and two million people over a period of two years, more than 200 a day in the worst affected areas.

The international airlift of relief supplies which started in July was hampered by heavily armed gangs of clansmen who looted food storage centres and slowed down the distribution of the supplies by aid organisations.

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Year: 1993

Photograph: Larry Towell

Image: Boys raise toy guns in a gesture of defiance. The Palestinian uprising, which began in December 1987, strengthened the Arab population in their determination to fight the occupying force.

In March, Israel closed its border with Gaza, causing a massive rise in unemployment. With more than 800,000 people contained in the Israeli-patrolled, eight-km-wide strip of land, bloodshed increased sharply.

The peace agreement signed in Washington on September 13 promised limited authority for the Gaza Strip and a withdrawal of the Israeli army.

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Year: 1994

Photograph: James Nachtwey

Image: A Hutu man at a Red Cross hospital, his face mutilated by the Hutu 'Interahamwe' militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels, in Rwanda.

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Year: 1995

Photograph: Lucian Perkins

Image: A bus on the road leading to Grozny during fighting between Chechen independence fighters and Russian troops.

The civil war which erupted when President Boris Yeltsin sent troops to the rebellious province in December 1994 was still dragging on months later.

When the Chechen fighters fled Grozny, the capital, where the war had claimed a horrendous human and material toll, Russian troops pursued them into the countryside to the south and east.

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Year: 1996

Photograph: Francesco Zizola

Image: Landmine victims in Kuito, central Angola, a town where many people were killed and traumatised during the civil war.

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Year: 1997

Photograph: Hocine

Image: A woman cries outside the Zmirli Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken after a massacre in Bentalha, Algiers.

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Year: 1998

Photograph: Dayna Smith

Image: A woman is comforted by relatives and friends at the funeral of her husband. The man was a soldier with the ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting for independence from Serbia. He had been shot the previous day while on patrol.

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Year: 1999

Photograph: Claus Bjorn Larsen

Image: A man walks the streets in one of the largest gathering points for ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing violence in Kosovo.

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Year: 2000

Photograph: Lara Jo Regan

Image: The mother of a Mexican immigrant family makes pinatas to support herself and her children.

The family numbers among the millions of 'uncounted' Americans, people who for one reason or another have been missed by the national census and so don't exist in population records.

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Year: 2001

Photograph: Erik Refner

Image: The body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehydration is prepared for burial at Jalozai refugee camp.

The child's family, originally from North Afghanistan, had sought refuge in Pakistan from political instability and the consequences of drought.

The family gave the photographer permission to attend as they washed and wrapped his body in a white funeral shroud, according to Muslim tradition. In the overcrowded Jalozai camp, 80,000 refugees from Afghanistan endured squalid conditions.

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Year: 2002

Photograph: Eric Grigorian

Image: A boy holds his dead father's trousers as he squats beside the spot where his father is to be buried, surrounded by soldiers and villagers digging graves for victims of an earthquake in Armenia.

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Year: 2003

Photograph: Jean-Marc Bouju

Image: An Iraqi man comforts his four-year-old son at a holding centre for prisoners of war, in the base camp of the US Army's 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf, Iraq.

The boy had become terrified when, according to orders, his father was hooded and handcuffed. A soldier later severed the plastic handcuffs so that the man could comfort his child.

Hoods were placed over detainees' heads because they were quicker to apply than blindfolds. The military said the bags were used to disorient prisoners and protect their identities. It is not known what happened to the man or the boy.

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Year: 2004

Photograph: Arko Datta

Image: A woman mourns a relative killed in the tsunami. On December 26, a 9.3 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggered a series of deadly waves that traveled across the Indian Ocean, wreaking havoc in nine Asian countries, and causing fatalities as far away as Somalia and Tanzania.

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Year: 2005

Photograph: Finbarr O'Reilly

Image: The fingers of malnourished one-year-old Alassa Galisou are pressed against the lips of his mother Fatou Ousseini at an emergency feeding centre in Niger.

One of the worst droughts in recent times, together with a particularly heavy plague of locusts that had destroyed the previous year's harvest, left millions of people severely short of food.

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Year: 2006

Photograph: Spencer Platt

Image: Young Lebanese drive down a street in Haret Hreik, a bombed neighbourhood in southern Beirut.

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Year: 2007

Photograph: Tim Hetherington

Image: A soldier of Second Platoon, Battle Company of the Second Battalion of the US 503rd Infantry Regiment sinks onto an embankment in the Restrepo bunker at the end of the day, in Afghanistan.

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Year: 2008

Photograph: Anthony Suau

Image: Detective Robert Kole of Ohio's Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office enters a home, following mortgage foreclosure and eviction. He needs to check that the owners have vacated the premises, and that no weapons have been left lying around.

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Year: 2009

Photograph: Pietro Masturzo

Image: Women shout their dissent from a Tehran rooftop on June 24, following Iran's disputed presidential election.

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Year: 2010

Photograph: Jodi Bieber

Image: Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, fled back to her family home from her husband's house, complaining of violent treatment.

The Taliban arrived one night, demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice. After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict, Bibi's brother-in-law held her down and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose. Bibi was abandoned, but later rescued by aid workers and the US military.

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