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Title: Child Witnesses To Afghan Massacre Say Robert Bales Was Not Alone
Source:
MSNBC
URL Source: http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_new ... say-robert-bales-was-not-alone
Published: Mar 30, 2012
Author: MSNBC
Post Date: 2012-03-30 12:38:46 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 446
Comments: 1
Here are two versions of what happened the night of March 11, when 17 Afghan villagers were shot to death. First, the Army version: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, troubled by marriage woes, drunkenly left Camp Belambai, 12 miles from Kandahar, with a pistol and an automatic rifle and killed six people as they slept. Bales then returned to the base and left again for another village, this time killing 11. He acted alone and he admitted to the killings, according to the Army. Then there is the account that child witnesses provided Yalda Hakim, a journalist for SBS Dateline in Australia. Hakim, who was born in Afghanistan and immigrated to Australia as a child, is the first international journalist to interview the surviving witnesses. She said American investigators tried to prevent her from interviewing the children, saying her questions could traumatize them. She said she appealed to village leaders, who arranged for her to interview the witnesses. In the video, the children told Hakim that other Americans were present during the rampage, holding flashlights in the yard. Noorbinak, 8, told Hakim that the shooter first shot her father’s dog. Then, Noorbinak said in the video, he shot her father in the foot and dragged her mother by the hair. When her father started screaming, he shot her father, the child says. Then he turned the gun on Noorbinak and shot her in the leg. “One man entered the room and the others were standing in the yard, holding lights,” Noorbinak said in the video. A brother of one victim told Hakim that his brother’s children mentioned more than one soldier wearing a headlamp. They also had lights at the end of their guns, he said. “They don’t know whether there were 15 or 20, however many there were,” he said in the video. Army officials have repeatedly denied that others were involved in the massacre, emphasizing that Bales acted alone. Bales, who was flown to a maximum-security military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., was charged last week with 17 counts of murder and six attempts of attempted murder. The massacre came several days after a roadside bomb attack that cost one soldier his leg. Village residents told reporters and Afghan government officials that after the roadside bomb attack, U.S. troops lined up men from the village against a wall and told them they would pay a price. The Pentagon has denied those allegations. Gen. Karimi, assigned by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to investigate the murders, told Hakim that he, too, wonders whether Bales acted alone and how he could left the base without notice. “Village elders said several soldiers took part and that there is boot prints in the area,” Karimi told Hakim. He said villagers told him that they saw three or four individuals kneeling and that helicopters were overhead during the rampage. “To search for him?” Karimi said he asked them. “No,” he said they told him. “They were there from the very beginning.”
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#1. To: Afghan Suspect Attorney, US Gov 'Hiding Evidence' (#0)
(03-30) 09:31 PDT SEATTLE, (AP) -- The attorney for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians said Friday that the U.S. government is "hiding evidence" from the defense team. John Henry Browne told The Associated Press that members of the defense team in Afghanistan were told they would have access to witnesses at a hospital, but later discovered the people had been released. He also said the U.S. government has not turned over files to the lawyers defending Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. The defense team said in a statement the prosecution is withholding information "while potential witnesses scatter." "It's outrageous," Browne said. "What they are basically doing is hiding evidence. The only reason to hide evidence is if you don't have evidence." An Army spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment on Browne's allegations. Bales has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. He remained held at a U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The defense statement said the team in Afghanistan attempted to interview injured civilians being treated at a hospital in Kandahar, but were denied access and told to coordinate with prosecutors. The prosecution team interviewed the civilians, but the defense team said they were unable to after the people were released and no contact information was provided for them. Browne's team also said they have been denied access to the civilians' medical records, as well as video allegedly taken from a surveillance blimp showing Bales on the night of the killings. Dan Conway, a military attorney who represented one of four Lewis-McChord soldiers convicted in the deliberate killings of three Afghan civilians in 2010, said the government doesn't appear to be doing anything wrong at this point in the Bales case. He said prosecutors have little obligation to turn over evidence right now and doesn't need to help coordinate interviews this early in the process. "This is just going to be an uphill battle," Conway said. The defense will have a right to interview witnesses that could be called at trial, so the Army could then take the defense team into the villages with security or coordinate to have them come onto the military base. But Conway said the challenges of interviewing witnesses now means the defense team may not be able to track down people to bolster their case — such as witnesses unable to identify Bales or those who believe there were two shooters. "If they want to talk to those witnesses, they're going to have to get an investigator and probably go to the village and talk to civilians themselves," Conway said. U.S. military officials have said Bales was drinking on a southern Afghanistan base on March 11 before creeping away to two villages at night, shooting his victims and setting many of them on fire. Nine were children. Bales has had incidents involving alcohol and violence in the past. In 2002, He was arrested for a drunken assault of a security guard at a Tacoma casino. That charge was dismissed after Bales completed 20 hours of anger management training. In 2008, a couple accused an intoxicated Bales of grabbing a woman's hand and thrusting it toward his crotch before kicking and punching the woman's boyfriend, according to a police report. Prosecutors declined to pursue that case. Never swear "allegiance" to anything other than the 'right to change your mind'! 
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