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POL-mortars-AFG-22Nov07

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 4 months ago

 

 

Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act.

 

Soldiers under orders to fire on Afghan villages?

Warsaw Business Journal Online, 22 Nov 07

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The Polish peace troop scandal in Afghanistan has taken another turn, with Gazeta Wyborcza claiming that an order to mortar as many as three Afghan villages was made before the Polish troops even left the military base Wazi-Kwa, and certainly before the soldiers hit the mine.

 

The Polish peace troop scandal in Afghanistan has taken another turn, with Gazeta Wyborcza claiming that an order to mortar as many as three Afghan villages was made before the Polish troops even left the military base Wazi-Kwa, and certainly before the soldiers hit the mine. So far, seven soldiers have been arrested and the court believes that they knew that there were civilians in one of the villages bombed, and despite this knowledge they did not refuse to carry out the order. While the source of the order has yet to come out, it certainly came from someone ranked much higher than the platoon leader Tomasz B. It is also known that the story so far given by the arrested soldiers was fabricated by officers who told lower ranked soldiers their version of the truth. Fearful of the consequences of the mortar shooting, however, the accused soldiers are abandoning their first statements and according to the court, their lives were never endangered. Still, while it cannot yet be proven that the soldiers killed the civilians on purpose, they could have foreseen the result of their actions. "It seems that an order to shoot was made from behind a desk. And then they checked who was hit. This is a scandal," said one of the Polish majors who participated in the mission in Afghanistan. Ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski stated that the Polish government should apologize for the crime "when its final assessment is eventually presented", but he also criticized the brutal arrest of the accused soldiers in Poland. (Gazeta Wyborcza, pp. 1, 8) M.M. Photo credit: Flickr user smartsnake.

 


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