US troops posed with Afghan body parts: report
ISTANBUL
REUTERS/Baz Ratner
An American soldier released photos of a group of a soldiers posing for photos with parts of dead Afghan bombers, Los Angeles Times reported.One of the leaked photos show several U.S. troopers holding the severed legs of Afghan suicide bombers, grinning, with one of them holding both thumbs up. Another depicts two soldiers smiling with a dead body of an Afghan suicide bomber.
The photos were taken in February 2010 when the soldiers were sent to an Afghan police station to obtain "iris scans and finger prints" to identify the bombers on once occasion, and a few months after, when they were sent to identify three dead bombers who were killed while trying to build their own bomb.
U.S. Army kicked off a criminal investigation once the Los Angeles Times contacted them with the photos, 18 in total, but officials initially asked the Times not to publish them. The Times, however, chose to publish a “small but representative selection.”
The soldier who provided the images claimed that almost all of the soldiers in the photos knew people who had been killed or wounded by bombs during their time in Afghanistan.
"They were frustrated, just pissed off – their buddies had been blown up by IEDs," the soldier was quoted as saying by the Times. "So they sort of just celebrated."
