Kabul, March 30: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has denounced the killing of Afghan civilians by US forces for fun, saying he is shocked by the recently published photos of US forces posing with dead Afghans.
The Afghan chief executive described the killing of a teenager by US military as a tragedy on Wednesday.
“It is a tragic story and reading it hurts our feeling. This crime committed by those soldiers,” Karzai noted.
The comments followed the release of videos and photos that show US soldiers’ killing of civilians in war-wrecked Afghanistan.
The photos and videos belong to members of an alleged rogue army unit “kill team” accused of murdering Afghan civilians for sport.
The videos show US soldiers cut the finger of an Afghan teen they killed ‘for kicks’ and later used it to wage a bet while playing cards, the weekly magazine Rolling Stone reported.
A week after one soldier was jailed after striking a plea bargain to testify against the alleged team’s ringleader, the magazine published a series of graphic images and a long story, including extensive details of the allegations.
The images were published just days after another batch of pictures taken by the soldiers appeared in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
The Rolling Stone pictures included vivid versions of photos published by Der Spiegel, showing soldiers posing with the bloodied body of the Afghan youth, holding the head up to the camera.
Pentagon, according to media reports, said in a statement released on Monday it had apologized for the gruesome incident committed by the US troops.
—Agencies