Posted on 05/23/2004 9:57:18 AM PDT by dila813
BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US military admitted that there were inconsistencies between its insistance foreign fighters had been killed in an airstrike earlier this week and claims from Iraqis that a wedding party had been hit.
Displaying photographs of military equipment, medical supplies and "dormitory" style accommodation found at the site of the airstrike, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt acknowledged that six women were killed in the attack.
"There are still some inconsistences. We still remain open-minded about this. We will continue to look into everything that is provided to us in the way of evidence," the military spokesman said.
Kimmitt showed the images at a news conference in response to repeated questions over the incident, in which coalition officials said 41 people were killed.
He said US forces, which scoured the area of the combined ground and air attack in the western Iraqi desert had found "no evidence of a wedding," but did not rule out some other kind of social gathering.
"Bad people have parties too and it may have ... just been a meeting in the middle of the desert by some people that were conducting either criminal or terrorist activities," he said.
Troops on the ground had discovered items such as "terrorist training manuals", military binoculars, foreign passports, medical equipment and possible narcotics, and dormitory-style accommodation for 300 people.
Kimmitt repeated that Wednesday's attack was based on intelligence that armed insurgents were gathering in the remote desert near the Syrian border, and reiterated that US ground forces were fired upon before calling in the air strike.
The Arab satellite news channel Al-Arabiya aired footage of bodies wrapped in blankets and loaded on trucks, and quoted witnesses as saying that aircraft also destroyed other houses apart from the venue of the wedding party.
"We believe six (women) were killed, we acknowledge that," Kimmitt said, but reiterated that forces had not seen bodies of children.
He added that the terrain shown in the footage on television did not match that around the scene of the attack, saying he believed the bodies were filmed in Ramadi, closer to the capital.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt showed photographs of military equipment and medical equipment at the site of a US airstrike that some people claim had hit a wedding party in Iraq (news - web sites).(AFP/File/Ramzi Haidar)
And Where are the Pictures? Where are they published? I can't find them? Lies by omission....Why didn't the AFP include those with its story?
no pictures because it would show the AP/Reuters "reporters" to be useless-idiot liars and Yahoo and company to be complicit in the fraud and attempts to destroy our country!
Curious, I looked up who "AFP", the authors of the story, are.
Bingo - Agence France Presse
Some of the guys were taking some of those virgins early.
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