The violence that led to the deaths of six military policemen in Majar al-Kabir appeared to have been sparked by a misunderstanding between soldiers and local people, the commander of British troops in Iraq conceded yesterday.
When British troops arrived in the town on Tuesday, local people wrongly assumed they had come to continue searching for weapons despite an earlier agreement to end the searches, Major General Peter Wall said in a statement. In fact the soldiers were intending to conduct a routine patrol.
The statement, issued in London, came as witness reports supported fears that the six soldiers from the Royal Military Police were executed after a mob of up to 1 000 villagers surrounded a police station.
A local journalist, Ali Attiyah, told the Guardian he managed to get into the police station shortly after the men died. He said that some of the soldiers were slumped on chairs and their faces seemed to have many bullet holes.
”Their bodies were still hot,” said Attiyah, who works for the Arab language Radio Sawa. ”They had probably been killed only a few minutes beforehand. It was a sad and painful sight.”
The Ministry of Defence insisted it still did not know the sequence of events which led to the deaths of the ”Red Caps” on Tuesday.
But Gen Wall said that a six-man military police patrol had left 1 Para’s base in Amara bound for al-Uzayr. On the way there, the patrol intended to drop in on a number of local police stations to liaise with and monitor the local police force. The route took them initially to Majar al-Kabir.
He said the paras went into the town independently hours before the six Red Caps were killed and were on a ”routine joint patrol” with local militia.
”The crowd violence appears to have stemmed from a misunderstanding,” he said. ”The townspeople expected searches for weapons to be conducted by our patrols.
”That was not our intent and this had been explained to the town council at a formal meeting earlier in the week, when the strength of their resentment to weapons searches had become clear.”
He added: ”I can assure you that we will do our utmost to ensure that those responsible are held to account.”
The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, said he was concerned the Iraqis had also not understood that the paratroopers had initially fired plastic baton rounds rather than live ammunition.
After attacking the paratroopers, an angry crowd surrounded the police station where the RMPs were training local Iraqis.
Attiyah, one of a group of community leaders who liaise with British forces in the area, said he staged a dramatic rescue attempt. Accompanied by two local doctors, he drove toward the besieged station in an ambulance. The angry crowd parted to let the ambulance through, but the soldiers were already dead.
Attiyah said he then drove back to inform the British forces in al-Majar, who had withdrawn to the edge of town amid fierce street fighting with armed local residents.
”I told the officer in charge, and he just looked at me in shock. I didn’t know what to say. I count them as my friends.”
Attiyah said the officer asked him to retrieve the bodies. ”I carried them in blankets, loaded them on to the ambulance and took them back to the British line. As I picked them up, I looked at their faces; so young and good looking. And I felt shamed. The British came here as liberators. They got rid of Saddam for us. They gave us freedom and we gave them death.” – Guardian Unlimited Â