He loves children, he’s like a big kid himself. I have no idea what happened, but he would not … he loves children, and he would not do that.Karilyn Bales, wife of Afghan shooting suspect Robert Bales • Speaking on “The Today Show” about the allegations against her husband. Bales, whose husband went into the military in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, says her husband is “very brave, very courageous,” but admits that he did not tell her everything about his work. For example, she did not learn he suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq until he returned home. Robert Bales is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from which he and his wife shared a phone call last week.
» Meant as compensation? According to Afghan official Haji Nyamat Khan (a Kandahar provincial council member), he U.S. government offered the money as a way to help the families, not solely as compensation. But a NATO official disputed that, specifically saying it was meant as compensation. Whether or not this is the case could be significant, as “blood money” can be used as a way to replace a trial in Afghanistan. The suspect in the shooting, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, is currently getting tried in the U.S., but many Afghan want him to be tried there.
Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales will be charged with 17 counts of murder, assault and a string of other offenses in the massacre of Afghan villagers as they slept, a U.S. official said.
The charges signed against Bales include 17 counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder and six counts of aggravated assault as well as dereliction of duty and other violations of military law, the official said on condition of anonymity because the charges had not been announced.
Updated with latest info.
The lawyer for US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the soldier who stands accused of massacring 16 Afghan citizens on March 11, 2012, claims there is no evidence linking his client to the killings in a new interview with the Guardian. John Henry Browne says his client has “some memories of what occurred that evening, before the supposed incident, and he has some memories of what happened after the alleged incident,” but has no recollection of the time in-between.
A senior U.S. official says the soldier accused in the killings is Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation into an incident that has roiled relations with Afghanistan.
Bales, who is 38, is a husband and father of two young children and a veteran who was in the midst of his fourth tour in a war zone. But because of a tightly controlled flow of information, many of the details are incomplete and difficult to verify.
It took a fairly long time — nearly a full week — for his name to surface. Part of this was that the only sources talking, the U.S. military and the suspect’s lawyer, John Henry Browne (who spoke about the case earlier this morning), each had vested interests in keeping his identity hidden.
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