An American soldier was detained after walking off his base in southern Kandahar province and shooting at Afghan civilians, causing casualties, Western officials said on Sunday. “A United States service member was detained today in connection to an incident that resulted in Afghan casualties in Kandahar province,” NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.
A Western official told AFP: “A soldier walks off the base in the early hours on Sunday morning and starts shooting. He got back to the office and was detained.” An AFP reporter counted 16 bodies — including women and children — in three Afghan houses. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said it had arrested a soldier “in connection to an incident that resulted in Afghan casualties in Kandahar province”, without giving a figure for the dead or injured. “In one house, I saw 10 people, including women and children killed and burned in one room. Another woman was lying dead at the entrance of the house,” the AFP reporter said from the scene in southern Kandahar province.
He saw “at least two children, two or three years old”. One other person died in a second house in Alkozai village while four more were killed in nearby Najeeban village, he said. In the house where one person was killed, an elderly woman was screaming: “May God kill the only son of (President Hamid) Karzai, so he feels what we feel.” The US embassy in Kabul issued a statement extending “its deepest condolences to the families of the victims of today’s tragic shooting incident in Kandahar province.
