Fallujah deaths “will not go unpunished”
The US has sworn revenge on those responsible for the killing of four American contractors in Iraq.
The brutal killings and desecration of the corpses were captured by TV cameras. The men were ambushed and killed as they drove through Fallujah, their bodies were pulled from the car wreck, chopped into pieces, and two were strung from a bridge over the Euphrates river.
Mark Kimmitt, deputy head of coalition operations in Iraq, said troops “will respond” to the incident.
“They are going to hunt down the people responsible for his bestial act.
“It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. It will be methodical, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming,” he said.
Paul Bremer, US overseer in Iraq, said: “Their deaths will not go unpunished. They have not died in vain,” while at the graduation of a new batch of Iraqi police.
Mr Bremer branded the attacks “inexcusable and despicable”.
North Carolina-based Blackwater Security Consulting has confirmed that the men were employees, but they have yet to be named. “The exact identities of the victims are not known”, the company has reported.
The killings, and their broadcast, will alarm US security chiefs – who saw popular support for the intervention in Somalia in 1993 crumble after the “Black Hawk Down” incident, which subsequently led to the withdrawal of US forces, and the descent of that country into warlord-dominated lawlessness.
