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Staff Sgt. Robert Bales during an exercise at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California
U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged on Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said.
The 38-year-old soldier is accused of walking off a U.S. military base with his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, before dawn on March 11, killing nine Afghan children and eight adults and burning some of the bodies. It was the worst allegation of civilian killings by an American and has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war.
It's unclear what prompted the killings, but the case has drawn new attention to the debate over mental health care for the troops, who have experienced record suicide rates and high incidences of post-traumatic stress and brain injuries during repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Six other Afghans - a man, a woman and four children - were wounded in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. Bales also was charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in those cases, according to Col. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan who disclosed information from the charging document.
Bales, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, was officially informed of the 29 charges just before noon local time at the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is confined.
Comment: More Mossad fingerprints on this operation. The U.S.-based monitoring group SITE is in fact a Mossad outfit run by IDF graduate Rita Katz. Her team's job is to 'discover' links between patsies and jihadist websites by leaking dubious internet postings, video and audio recordings to the media, all dredged from online hangouts of "radicalised" Muslim misfits fed up with the US, UK, France and Israel's wars of imperial conquest.