KABUL — Outrage mounted in Afghanistan Monday after a US soldier allegedly gunned down 16 villagers in their homes, with Taliban insurgents vowing revenge and Afghan lawmakers demanding a public trial.
Meanwhile, speaking publicly for the first time since the incident, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the soldier could face the death penalty.
“My understanding is, in these instances, that could be a consideration,” Panetta told reporters who were traveling with him Monday on a flight to Kyrgyzstan, Bloomberg News reported.
“We are following the procedures that we follow in these situations to review the case and then bring appropriate charges.”
“War is hell,” Panetta said. “These kinds of events and incidents are going to take place. But we cannot allow these events to undermine our strategy or the mission.”
The defense secretary also sketched out a basic account of the killings, beginning early Sunday when the soldier left the small base where he was stationed in southern Afghanistan and walked about a mile to a village where he went from house to house, shooting civilians then apparently trying to burn some of their bodies.
Panetta’s account showed that although a search was launched for the missing man, it was too late to stop his massacre, The Wall Street Journal reported.
An Afghan soldier noticed him leaving, and reported it to post commanders, who quickly determined the staff sergeant was unaccounted for. As commanders were assembling a search party, reports of the shootings reached the base, Panetta and other US officials said.
“He went out in the morning, in the early morning and went to these homes and fired on these families,” Panetta said. “At some point after that he came back to the forward operating base and basically turned himself in, told individuals what had happened.”
The rogue soldier has not been identified, but emerging details suggest he was a trained sniper who may have suffered a traumatic brain injury two years before his alleged rampage, while on a posting in Iraq.
As fallout from the killings continued amid raised tensions between Washington and Kabul, the Taliban said in a statement it will “take revenge from the invaders and the savage murderers for every single martyr.”
“If the perpetrators of this massacre were in fact mentally ill then this testifies to yet another moral transgression by the American military because they are arming lunatics in Afghanistan who turn their weapons against the defenseless Afghans without giving a second thought,” the statement from the hardline Islamist group said.
In the Afghan parliament, some angry lawmakers reportedly chanted “Death to America” as they demanded a resolution that the shooter be put on public trial in an Afghan court.
“The Americans have killed intentionally, this wasn’t a mistake,” a Kandahar lawmaker, Mullah Sayed Mohammed Akhund, argued, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The soldier is in US custody in Afghanistan and is subject only to American military justice as part of a bilateral agreement.
A senior US official told FOX News Channel the alleged shooter suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) during a previous tour in Iraq in 2010, reportedly from a vehicle rollover accident.
The staff sergeant — who was a trained infantry sniper based out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Wash. — was subsequently treated and deemed “fit for duty,” the official said.
Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby did not name the soldier but said he was in his mid-30s, was married with two children and was on his first mission in Afghanistan. Military sources also told FOX he had family problems and possible marital trouble before his latest deployment.
In Afghanistan, he reportedly was involved in an operation to develop ties with village elders and police units as part of an attempt to track down members of the Taliban in the Panjway district of Kandahar province.
It is not known if he knew, or had been involved with, any of his victims. As a joint Afghan-coalition investigation was launched into the shooting, officials said they believe the soldier acted alone.
Nine of the 16 fatalities were children and three were women, Afghan officials said.
A Panjway elder told the Journal one of the villagers, a young man, had lost his entire family in the shootings. “We don’t know what he will do because we can’t make him quiet, he can’t stop crying,” the elder said. “If the Americans want to strengthen the insurgents, they will continue these brutal acts.”
President Hamid Karzai reacted with anger to the incident, saying, “When the Americans are killing civilians intentionally, this is called terror and it is an unforgivable act.”
The attack further strained relations between the US and Kabul, weeks after protests erupted across Afghanistan in response to the burning of Korans at a US base.
But President Barack Obama, who called Karzai to express his personal “shock and sadness” over the incident, said the pace of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has not changed in light of the massacre.
“It’s important for us to make sure that we get out in a responsible way, so that we don’t end up having to go back in,” Obama said in an interview with KDKA-TV, of Pittsburgh. “But what we don’t want to do is to do it in a way that is just a rush for the exits.”
On the sidelines of a UN meeting on Syria Monday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed the US remains “committed to the goals we and our partners have set forth” in Afghanistan despite the “awful” attack. But she conceded “an incident like this is inexplicable and will certainly cause many questions to be asked.”