An Afghan parliamentary fact-finding mission reports that two women were raped before being killed in the US NATO night raid on Panjwaii. Yeah, Americans still can’t pronounce My Lai. The same US corporate press is raping Afghanistan.
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Press TV
March 18, 2012
An Afghan parliamentary investigation team says the massacre of at least 16 civilians by American soldiers in Kandahar province was planned in retaliation for an earlier attack on US forces.
The head of the Afghan parliamentary investigation, Sayed Ishaq Gillani, said the locals suspect that the slaughter of the Afghan civilians was carried out in revenge for an attack which destroyed an American tank last week.
Earlier on Monday, the Afghan tribal leaders of Kandahar province also said that the carnage was in retaliation against the bomb attack on the US tank in the Zangabad region in Panjwaii district in the province of Kandahar.
Following the blast, the American forces summoned local Afghans and tribal leaders of the region and vowed a bloody revenge on their children and wives, the Kandahar tribal leaders added.
The new findings came in the wake of an earlier report by the team, which suggested that the American troopers also raped two female victims of the massacre before killing them.
The investigation mission also implicated up to 20 US soldiers in the carnage. “We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups,” investigator Hamizai Lali said.
Sergeant Robert Bales, one of the soldiers accused of involvement in the massacre of Afghan civilians, was flown from a temporary military prison in Kuwait to a maximum security cell in Fort Leavenworth in the US state of Kansas. The transfer of the US soldier outraged the Afghan people, who demanded the public trial of the perpetrators of the heinous act in their country.
Earlier on Friday, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai criticized the United States for not cooperating with the Afghan fact-finding team and said the killing of the civilians by foreign forces in Afghanistan “has been going on for too long.”
On March 11, a group of US soldiers went from house to house in Kandahar’s Panjwaii district and gunned down Afghan civilians inside their homes, killing at least 16 people, mostly women and children, and injuring several others.
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Afghan probe team finds multiple
soldiers behind Kandahar killings
KABUL, March 18 (Xinhua) — More than a dozen U.S. soldiers had reportedly been involved in the Kandahar killing of 16 civilians, a local newspaper reported on Sunday, citing members of the Afghan parliament who were part of an investigation to probe the incident.
“The delegation sent to Kandahar by the Afghan House of Representatives (Lower House of Parliament) reported on Saturday that two groups of (American) soldiers totaling 15 to 20 troops carried out the planned attack with air support,” Daily Outlook Afghanistan reported.
The incident described by many Afghans as “carnage” happened on March 11 when a rogue U.S. soldier came out of his base in Panjwai district and entered a few houses nearby, opened indiscriminate fire leaving 16 people dead including three women and nine children and nine others injured.
However, a U.S. investigation has repeatedly maintained that only one soldier has committed the killing who had been detained.
Despite Afghans’ strong demand that the suspect be tried publicly in the country, the U.S. military transferred the accused soldier, who has been identified as Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, to the United States.
The report, citing a parliamentarian, Mohammad Naeem Lali Hamidzai, said that before the civilians being killed by American soldiers, two women had been sexually assaulted.
The Afghan government has yet to release the findings of a team who were assigned by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to investigate into the killings.
The incident further strained the relationship between Washington and Kabul, which has already been clouded by other recent incidents including the burning of Quran at a U.S. base in Afghanistan and reports of U.S. service members urinating on the corpses of Taliban soldiers.