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Kandahar massacre revenge for attack on US troops: Afghan report

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales (L), one of the soldiers accused of involvement in the recent massacre of Afghan civilians, at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, August 23, 2011

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.