US faces outcry over Taliban trophy pictures

The Pentagon has condemned the 'inhuman conduct' of American soldiers who posed for trophy photographs with body parts of dead Taliban bombers.

An investigation began after the release of graphic pictures showing a group of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division, together with members of the Afghan police, smiling for the camera while posing with corpses.

A total of 18 pictures, taken in 2010, were passed to the Los Angeles Times by an anonymous soldier, who said he wanted to illustrate what he called a breakdown in leadership and discipline.

The newspaper published two of the photographs, one of which showed soldiers holding up the severed legs of a bomber and giving a thumbs-up sign. The second picture showed a paratrooper posing with what appeared to be the hand of a corpse resting on his shoulder.

Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, led a concerted effort to condemn the latest photographs.

"The behaviour depicted absolutely violates our regulations and, more importantly, our core values," he said. "This is not who we are and it is certainly not who we represent when it comes to the great majority of men and women in uniform who are serving there.

"This is war. I know war is ugly and is violent. I know that young people sometimes caught up in the moment make very foolish decisions. I am not excusing that but neither do I want these images to bring further injuries to our people or to our relationship with the Afghan people."

Officials in Kabul were bracing for Afghan reaction to the photographs. The disclosure of previous trophy pictures has provoked disgust, but not violence.

The photographs were taken on two separate occasions. The first was in February 2010 when soldiers were called to a police station in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, following a suicide bombing.

A few months later the same platoon went to the morgue in Qalat after three insurgents accidentally blew themselves up while preparing a roadside bomb. On both visits the soldiers were supposed to get fingerprints of the dead for a database being maintained by US forces.

The incidents happened during a year-long deployment of the 3,500-strong 82nd Airborne's 4th Brigade Combat Team, which is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. During the deployment it lost 35 men, including at least 23 to suicide bombers or improvised explosive devices.

The whistle-blowing soldier said those in the photographs had felt "satisfied" to discover Taliban killed by their own bombs, and the pictures were distributed among other servicemen. He told the Los Angeles Times: "Their buddies had been blown up by IEDs so they sort of just celebrated."

US officials said most of the soldiers in the photographs had been identified. Mr Panetta also confirmed that it had asked the newspaper not to publish the pictures, claiming they could lead to retaliation against US troops.

Davan Maharaj, the Los Angeles Times editor, said it printed a small selection to "fulfil our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan."

The scandal was the latest embarrassment for US forces in Afghanistan. In January, marines were found to have made a video of themselves urinating on Afghan corpses. Inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran at a Nato air base the following month provoked riots that left 30 dead and led to the revenge killings of six Americans. Last month a US soldier went on a shooting rampage in which he is accused of killing 17 civilian villagers.

-- Britain will contribute pounds 70?million a year to funding Afghanistan's security force after Nato withdraws combat troops at the end of 2014, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said yesterday (Wednesday).

The announcement came as a British soldier died of his wounds after an explosion in southern Afghanistan last week, the 409th member of the forces to have died in the country since October 2001.

The soldier, from the 33 Engineer Regiment (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), was flown back to Britain where he died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham.