The bombing came as American ground forces fight to control the centre of the city and flew a number of raids against a building that was reported to be the hideout of senior Iraqi officials, possibly including Saddam Hussein and his sons.
Al Jazeera said that one of its cameramen was injured in the attack and another one of its team members was missing. It was later reported that Tariq Ayoub had died of his injuries. Another cameraman, Zuheir Iraqi, was slightly wounded with a shrapnel injury to his neck, it said.
The same attacks also took out Iraqi state TV, which has now gone off the air. The BBC reported that Iraqi TV had earlier failed to broadcast its regular morning news bulletin on the conflict and was instead relaying archive footage of Saddam Hussein and patriotic songs instead. Earlier attacks had previously taken Iraqi state television off the air last week, but it had later returned.
Al Jazeera, which has not flinched from showing blood and guts during the conflict so far, showed footage of the injured cameraman and reporter whose chest was covered in blood.
The wounded man was rushed to hospital as the station showed footage of another bomb hitting the same area of downtown Baghdad on the banks of the river Tigris.
In an on-air statement, Al Jazeera said: "We regret to inform you that our cameraman and correspondent Tariq Ayoub was killed this morning during the US missile strike on our Baghdad office."
Ayoub gave his last report just minutes before the missile attack and was reported to be broadcasting from the roof when the building was hit by two missiles, according to Tayseer Allouni, another Al Jazeera correspondent.
"It seems that we have become a target," Allouni said. Another of Al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondents, Majed Abdel Hadi, called the US missile strike and Ayoub's death a "crime".
The death of the Al Jazeera correspondent brings the total toll of reporters killed covering the war in Iraq to nine.
Yesterday, one as yet unnamed German journalist and a Spanish journalist, Julio Anguitta Parrado, 31, who was working for El Mundo, were killed. The previous evening, BBC World affairs editor John Simpson had been wounded in a friendly fire incident in northern Iraq.
At the weekend, David Bloom from NBC News died and fellow American journalist, Washington Post columnist and Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large Michael Kelly was killed on Friday.
Last week, BBC cameraman Kaveh Golestan was killed after stepping on a landmine in Northern Iraq and his producer, Stuart Hughes, was injured.
Channel 4 journalist Gaby Rado fell to his death from a hotel roof in the northern Iraqi town of Sulaymaniyah; ITN's Terry Lloyd died in a suspected friendly fire incident near Basra; and Australian Broadcasting Corporation cameraman Paul Moran was killed by a car bomb in northern Iraq.
Ayoub, 35, a Palestinian, only arrived in Baghdad five days ago to join the Al Jazeera team from the channel's Amman office, where he had worked as a financial correspondent for three years. Prior to Al Jazeera, he had worked for the Jordan Times and Associated Press.
Last week, Al Jazeera, which in recent weeks has broadcast images of dead and captured allied troops, stopped reporting from Iraq after two of its reporters were banned.
It claimed the move was in response to its two correspondents being ordered to leave the country by the Iraqi Information Ministry, which has accused it of being pro-Western.
The accusation came despite attacks on Al Jazeera by the White House and Downing Street, which have accused the broadcaster of, ironically, being a mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein's regime.
Al Jazeera earned the ire of Washington and London after it broadcast pictures showing captured allied troops and dead allied troops, including two British soldiers who may have been executed.
Air Marshal Brian Burridge, the commander of UK forces in the Gulf, condemned the footage as disgraceful.
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