Gruesome new details are surfacing after 16 Afghan villagers including nine children were shot in their houses by US servicemen. Witnesses to the atrocity now say that several drunken American soldiers were involved.
Neighbours at the village where the killings took place said they were awoken past midnight by crackling gunfire: "They (more than one) were all drunk and shooting all over the place," Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar's Panjwayi district.
Lala's neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”
Twenty-year-old Jan Agha says the gunfire “shook him out of bed.” He was in the epicenter of the horrible shooting, witnessing his father shot as the latter peered out of a window to see what was going on.
"The Americans stayed in our house for a while. I was very scared," the young man told reporters.
Lying on a floor, Agha says, he pretended to be dead.
He added that his brother was shot in his head and chest. His sister was killed as well. “My mother was shot in her eye and her face. She was unrecognizable,” he said.
A preliminary official report says the alleged unnamed culprit acted alone and is now in custody after turning himself in at an American base.
A senior US defense official in Washington blasted witness accounts that several apparently drunk soldiers were involved as “flatly wrong.”
The Afghan parliament said the incident was barbaric and demanded justice. Both NATO and US officials condemned the violence, promising a swift investigation.
US troops in Afghanistan have been put on high alert as the Taliban has issued a threat vowing “to take revenge from the invaders and the savage murderers for every single martyr.”
The statement published on the group’s website said that the US is “arming lunatics in Afghanistan who turn their weapons against the defenseless Afghans.”
Afghan officials, fearing possible violent demonstrations, have deployed extra police and troops in and around Kandahar.
The incident was one of many of its kind since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It comes just weeks after Korans were burned at a US military base, which provoked mass riots in Afghanistan.