Afghanistan war logs: How US marines sanitised record of bloodbath1

Two hours later Americans returned to the scene of the bombing to conduct an "exploitation of the blast site with pictures/grid cords as well as debriefing ANP leadership on scene". Journalists on the spot gave a more detailed account. They said angry marines tore their cameras from their hands, insisting they delete the pictures they had taken of bullet-pocked vehicles on the roadside. Rahmat Gul, a freelance photographer working for the Associated Press, said two soldiers and a translator came up to him and asked: "Why are you taking pictures? You don't have permission." Then they deleted his photographs.

Later, Gul said, one of the soldiers came up to him and raised his arm, as if to hit him. Taqiullah Taqi, a reporter for the private Tolo TV channel, said the Americans told him through a translator: "Delete them, or we will delete you."

But the Americans could not prevent anger surging through the local community. In those months, as the fighting escalated, concern about careless, trigger-happy Americans was rising in Afghanistan. The previous May, riots had spread across Kabul after a US military truck with faulty brakes careered into traffic, killing one man.

The logs report that nine hours after the shooting, the governor of Nangarhar province appealed to the marines to stay at home. "He did not want more CF [coalition forces] in the area due to public hostility." At about the same time the Americans stopped issuing internal reports. "Event closed at 1349Z" it read. But that was not the end of the affair.

Demonstrations ran through the streets of Jalalabad over the following days, the logs report, in which protesters broke windows and blocked roads.

A month later, in April 2007, the Afghan Human Rights Commission published a report into the shooting which said the victims included a 16-year-old newlywed girl carrying a bundle of grass and a 75-year-old man walking back from the shops. The report said the marines may have come under fire from one source straight after the suicide bomb but challenged the assertion they suffered a "complex ambush from several directions".