Attorney identifies Afghan suspect

Associated Press

SEATTLE

The attorney for a soldier accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan said Friday the suspect is 38-year-old Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales from Lake Tapps, Wash.

The military earlier had declined to name the suspect. A senior U.S. official said Friday it was Bales, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation into an incident that has roiled relations with Afghanistan.

John Henry Browne, a defense attorney from Seattle, confirmed his client’s identity.

American officials previously said the soldier was a 38-year-old staff sergeant and that he had spent 11 years in the Army. But they had refused to release his name, saying it is military policy to publicly name a suspect only after he has been charged with an offense.

Bales has not yet been charged. He was being flown Friday from Kuwait to a military detention center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the military’s only maximum-security prison.

Military officials say the soldier received sniper training and is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based at Lewis-McChord and has been dispatched to Iraq three times since 2003.

Meanwhile, warning he’s at the “end of the rope” over civilian casualties, Afghanistan’s president angrily accused the U.S. of not sharing information about how the American soldier reportedly shot and killed 16 Afghans in two villages.

The incident has reverberated through the complicated relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan, endangering talks over a long-term relationship after most U.S. and NATO combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

In an emotional meeting with relatives of the shooting victims, Karzai said the villagers’ accounts of the massacre were widely different from the scenario depicted by U.S. military officials. The relatives and villagers insisted that it was impossible for one gunmen to kill nine children, four men and three women in three houses of two villages near a U.S. combat outpost in southern Afghanistan.

Karzai said the delegation he sent to Kandahar province to investigate the shootings did not receive the expected cooperation from the U.S. He said many questions remained about what occurred.

The U.S. military had no comment on Karzai’s remarks.