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1:40pm (UK)
Troops Return to Massacre Town
By Emily Pennink, PA News
British troops today returned for the first time to the Iraqi town where six Military Police were killed earlier this week, military officials said.
They were met by a group of Shiite clerics and prominent officials from Majar al-Kabir in a peaceful ceremony aimed at putting the trouble in the past.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “I can confirm we have gone back into the town.
“About 500 troops went in with the full knowledge of the local authority and we have resumed joint patrols with local police officers.
“We have not stepped up our presence at all. All we have done is re-enter somewhere we have just left. Numbers of troops are the same.”
Captain Guy Winter, 30, from Dover, who made initial contact with the Iraqi delegation, said: “We are not here for retribution. We are here to re-establish communications and get the (rebuilding) process back on the road.”
The return followed a drop of some 52,000 leaflets on the southern Iraqi town of al Majar al-Kabir in a desperate attempt to halt the growing unrest in the area.
The leaflets promised that there would be no mass punishments for the killings – although military officials insisted they were not offering an amnesty to those who were responsible for the deaths of the Red Caps, who were killed on Tuesday.
“The priority is to win back the hearts and minds of the people in that town,” a British Army spokesman said.
“But by doing that one of the benefits will be that hopefully we will be able to catch the people responsible.
“There is certainly no amnesty.”
The leaflets, dropped by a British aircraft, said: “Everyone regrets the loss of life in al Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003.
“However it was not an incident of our making and we will return to al Majar al-Kabir, otherwise the coalition can do nothing to help your town recover from years of Saddam’s misrule.
“We will not return to punish you, that was a tactic of Saddam’s regime.”
The leaflets also urged townspeople not to let “rumour and misinformation split us apart”.
British Army commanders have suggested that a series of misunderstandings led to the killings during a riot in the town.
Orders were given on Monday for controversial weapons searches to be halted, but a “routine patrol” of Paratroopers and Red Caps entered the town on Tuesday, triggering scenes of fury among Iraqis who believed they would continue the searches.
The Paras escaped after coming under fire. One of the Paras’ patrol, as well as seven medics and other personnel in an RAF Chinook helicopter called to the scene, were injured.
But the Red Caps were hemmed in by a crowd of hundreds of angry Iraqis who surrounded a police station where the Britons had gone to meet local policemen.
They called for help some 30 minutes before they died, but their call might have been confused with a call for reinforcements from the Paras.
The Daily Mail reported that Major General Peter Wall, the senior British officer in southern Iraq, said two calls were received, but declined to say where the calls were from while the investigation is being carried out.
An Iraqi eyewitness, Ali Al-Ateya said: “They were trying to tell their colleagues at their base they were in trouble. But the help for them came too late.”
He said the men had pleaded for their lives, showing photographs of their families.
“They wanted to say, ‘We are just like you, look, we have wives and children too’. They hoped this would save them but it did not,” he said.
Reg Keys, the father of one of the dead men, Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, spoke of his fears that the Red Caps were left with no chance against the mob.
Mr Keys, from north Wales, told the BBC: “It is not clear at the moment, I must stress that, but it would appear that they sent these six young men into a police station to do a job in a hostile country with hostile elements with very very little support around them.
“To think that they could get trapped with no immediate support to call upon is of some concern to me.”
Investigations have been launched into the killings and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has raised the possibility of sending thousands more troops to Iraq, where United States troops have come under daily attack since the official end of combat operations.
The attacks have raised concern that the occupation could be turning into a fully fledged guerilla war.
Most of the violence has taken place in the Sunni Muslim-dominated belt north and west of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein had the greatest support.
But Tuesday’s killings in Al Majar al-Kabir were in the British-controlled south, raising fears that unrest could be spreading.
The US has blamed attacks on isolated remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime and his Sunni Muslim followers, and said there is no organised resistance.
The British soldiers killed were: Sergeant Simon Alexander Hamilton-Jewell, 41, from Chessington, Surrey; Corporal Russell Aston, 30, from Swadlincote, Derbyshire; Corporal Paul Graham Long, 24, from Colchester; Corporal Simon Miller, 21, from Tyne and Wear; Lance Corporal Benjamin John McGowan Hyde, 23, from Northallerton, North Yorkshire; and Lance Corporal Thomas Richard Keys, 20, from Llanuwchllyn, near Bala, north Wales.
Their deaths represent the heaviest single combat loss for British forces since the 1991 Gulf War. The killings take the British death toll since the Iraq war began in March to 43.
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