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Have the british soldiers really been executed???

Gunsch | 28.03.2003 12:07

Today, DER SPIEGEL, a mainstream German news magazine writes the following on the two british soldiers that had allegedly been executed in southern Iraq

Blair's Execution Propaganda

Tony Blair had spoken wholeheartedly of evidence that british POWs had been executed by Iraqi forces. Now, the sister and superior (?) of one of the killed britons said that this was a lie: the soldier had been killed in battle.

The british government had to meekly admit, that there is no "absolute evidence" for the "execution" of the two british soldiers in southern Iraq. In their press conference on Thursday in Camp David, Blair and US president George W. Bush had said that the soldiers had been "executed"/"murdered". "That is a war crime", Bush had said.

The sister of one of the soldiers now stated in the "Daily Mirror", she was very surprised about Blair's statement. She and the rest of her family had been told earlier that the 24 year old Luke Allsopp and his 36 year old comrade Simon Cullingworth had been killed in battle. "We just don't understand why those people are lying", Nina Allsopp said to the newspaper.

The group captain of the killed soldiers had even visited the family in person to tell them that Luke Allsopp was not executed. "Luke's Land Rover was ambushed and he was dead at once", the 29 year old woman stated. (...) "We are very angry".

The british government tried to defend itself: "The dead bodies were lying in some distance from the soldiers' vehicles", said the Blair's spokesman on Friday to the "Guardian". "They had lost their helmets and jackets. We accept that this is no absolute evidence but it looks like the men had been executed".

In the british headquarters in Qatar, a british army representative was cited as follows: "The TV footage (...) made us suspicious that they had been executed, but the footage is of bad quality and it does not provide any facts".

Gunsch
- Homepage: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,242371,00.html