Kabul (dpa) – The US military has paid compensation to the families of the victims of a shooting spree in which a US soldier is accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians, officials said Saturday. “The Americans paid 50,000 dollars for each Afghan killed and 11,000 dollars for each injured in the shootout by an American soldier,” said Hajji Agha Lalai Dastagiri, a member of the Kandahar provincial council. Dastagiri said President Hamid Karzai had also authorized compensation of more than 2,000 dollars for each Afghan killed. A US official in Kabul said, “The amount of compensation reflects the extraordinarily devastating nature of the incident. I confirm that compensation has been paid.” US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, 38, was on Friday charged with 17 counts of murder in the March 11 killings in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan. He is accused of leaving his military base and killing the civilians, many of whom were sleeping, in their homes in a village in the Panjwai district in Kandahar. Nine children were among the dead. Eleven victims were from one family. Bales could face the death penalty for 17 counts of murder with premeditation, along with six counts of attempted murder against additional civilians in Kandahar. He is currently detained in the military's top-security prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after he was flown out of Afghanistan despite demands by officials there for a trial in an Afghan court. In the days after the Kandahar massacre, Karzai insisted that the United States speed up its total withdrawal from Afghanistan to 2013 instead of 2014. The killings sparked outrage from Karzai's government and fueled Afghan public opinion that was already inflamed in recent weeks over the burning of Korans by US military personnel at an Afghan base, and the earlier leaked video of US Marines urinating on Afghan bodies. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/44b0w Tags: Afghanistan, Compensation, Massacre, United States Section: Central Asia, Latest News, North America
