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British soldiers 'executed'
26/06/2003 08:42 - (SA)
London - Four of six British soldiers killed in a southern Iraqi town were executed after they surrendered following a fierce gun battle, British newspapers reported on Thursday.
The British military policemen mounted a last stand on Tuesday at a police station in Al-Majar Al-Kabir, around 200 kilometres north of Iraq's second city of Basra, and were killed, possibly with their own weapons, after they refused to flee, papers said.
Most British newspapers, which carried the story of the deaths on their front pages, said the sequence of events was still unclear.
The Times reported the British troops were said to have ordered a group of Iraqi civilians with them whom they had been training as police officers to flee.
"They told us to save ourselves though they refused to run away. They were murdered in cold blood. There was no way they could escape. I'm so ashamed I left them," The Times quoted Salam Mohammed, one of the trainees, as saying.
Ali al-Ateya, an Iraqi radio journalist, claimed that he saw the Britons offering to surrender their weapons after two of their colleagues had already been shot dead. But ringleaders snatched the rifles and killed the soldiers.
Shot in the head
"They shot the British in the head, several times. The executioners were standing right in front of the Britons," he told The Times.
The military police team had come to the town to discuss uniforms for their trainees. They wanted local people to recognise the new police officers, who had been patrolling in civilian clothes, the paper added.
Residents of Al-Majar Al-Kabir, which during the war on Iraq was handed over to coalition forces without a shot being fired, were said to be angry that troops had started carrying out house searches for illegal weapons using dogs, which are considered unclean in Islam.
Witnesses told AFP that the Britons had killed four people in a firefight and injured 17 before being killed themselves.
The right-wing Daily Express ran pictures of the dead soldiers on its front page, under the headline: "Executed".
"Our boys made their last stand against a terrifying, hate filled mob in this bloody den of carnage," it added.
"No mercy" was the front page headline of the Daily Mail tabloid, which said the "hero soldiers (were) murdered in cold blood by an Iraqi mob".
- AFX
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