Baghdad: The US military said on Saturday that it had found no wrongdoing by American troops accused of intentionally killing civilians during a raid in a village north of Baghdad that left up to 13 Iraqis dead.
The investigation of the March 15 attack on a home in the town of Ishaqi was one of three probes into possible misconduct by American troops in Iraq.
US Marines are also accused of deliberately killing two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians in the western town of Haditha on November 19 after one of their own died in a roadside bombing.
Besides Haditha and Ishaqi, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman could face murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges in the April shooting death of an Iraqi man west of Baghdad.
The investigation of the attack in Ishaqi concluded that the US troops followed normal procedures in raising the level of force after they came under fire while approaching a building where they believed was an al-Qaida terrorist was hiding, said Maj Gen William Caldwell, a US military spokesman.
Caldwell also acknowledged there were "possibly up to nine collateral deaths" in addition to the four Iraqi deaths that the military announced at the time of the Ishaqi raid.
The results of the investigation were released amid questions about the original US report as television stations aired AP Television News footage of a row of dead children in the aftermath of the raid.
Army Brig Gen Donald Campbell, the chief of staff for US forces in Iraq, said Friday the military will cooperate with the Iraqi government in its own investigation of Haditha and other incidents of alleged wrongdoing by US troops.
New footage shot by AP Television News in Haditha and broadcast Saturday showed walls pockmarked with bullet holes inside a stone house belonging to people killed. There was also a dusty TV with an apparent bullet hole.
Iman Walid Abdul-Hameed, a 13-year-old girl who said she was in the house when the shootings occurred, said her brother and several other relatives were killed.
"We want the Americans to be hurt just like us," she told the cameraman from her cousin's house, where she is now living.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Thursday upbraided the US military over Haditha, which he called "a horrible crime," and accused US troops of habitually attacking unarmed civilians.
On Friday, White House press secretary Tony Snow said al-Maliki had told US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad that he had been misquoted. But Snow was unable to explain what al-Maliki told Khalilzad or how he had been misquoted.
Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld defended the training and conduct of US troops and said incidents such as the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha shouldn't happen.
"We know that 99.9 per cent of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner. We also know that in conflicts things that shouldn't happen, do happen," he said. "We don't expect US soldiers to act that way, and they're trained not to."
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