US says Marines killed Afghan civilians

A preliminary US military investigation indicates that more than 40 Afghans killed or wounded by Marines after a suicide bombing in a village near Jalalabad last month were civilians, the US commander who ordered the probe said on Apr. 14. Maj. Gen. Frank H. Kearney III, head of Special Operations Command Central, also said there is no evidence that the Marine Special Operations platoon came under small-arms fire after the bombing, although the Marines reported taking enemy fire and seeing people with weapons. The troops continued shooting as they traveled miles from the site of the Mar. 4 attack, he said. They hit several vehicles, killing at least 10 people and wounding 33, among them children and elderly villagers. An official Afghan report put the numbers at 12 killed and 35 wounded. "We found... no brass that we can confirm that small-arms fire came at them," Kearney said, referring to ammunition casings. "We have testimony from Marines that is in conflict with unanimous testimony from civilians at the sites," Kearney said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Qatar, where he oversees all US Special Operations forces in the region, including in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kearney said of the killed and wounded: "My investigating officer believes those folks were innocent…. We were unable to find evidence that those were fighters." On Kearney's orders, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is conducting a probe that could lead to courts-martial of those involved. The military investigation found direct evidence, such as broken glass, showing that the Marines kept firing for about three miles as they left the ambush site in a convoy, Kearney said. The US military's report came on the heels of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission report on the incident. The official Afghan human rights investigation said the Marines continued shooting for 10 miles, which Kearney did not dispute. The commission said the Marines had acted illegally. The commission's inquiry found that a four-year-old girl, a one-year-old boy and three elderly villagers were among the dead. According to the Afghan commission, the troops fired indiscriminately at pedestrians, people in cars, public buses and taxis in six different locations along a 10-mile stretch of road. The civilian death and injury toll in the incident is one of the largest for which coalition troops have been accused since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001. The incident began when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-filled van into the Marines' convoy. After the attack, the convoy raced away, firing at pedestrians and vehicles along a 10-mile stretch of the road, the main highway between Kabul, the capital, and Jalalabad. The US military said at the time that the Marines had come under fire as they fled the bombing. But witnesses said no one appeared to be shooting at the troops and that reckless gunfire was directed at civilians miles from the scene of the attack. There were no Marine casualties in the bombing. One Marine suffered shrapnel wounds in the attack. "In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets, the [Marines] employed indiscriminate force," the Afghan report said. "Their actions thus constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian law." The human rights group also alleged that US troops removed spent ammunition casings and other evidence from the scene soon after the shootings, which hampered Afghan authorities' efforts to reconstruct the sequence of events. At the time of the incident, photographers for the Associated Press, as well as a reporter for Afghanistan's largest television station, Tolo TV, said US soldiers threatened them, forbade them from taking pictures and deleted what photos they did take. The reporter for Tolo TV, Taqiullah Taqi, said: "According to the translator, they said, 'Delete them, or we will delete you.'" The US military's initial investigation concluded that the Marines, members of a Special Forces unit based at Camp Lejeune, NC, had used excessive force in responding to the attack on their convoy. Their 120-member unit, which had arrived in Afghanistan only in January, was ordered out of the country shortly after the shootings. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly pleaded for Western troops to show more restraint amid concern that civilian deaths shake domestic support for the foreign military involvement that he needs to prop up his government, increasingly under threat from a resurgent Taliban.