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US apologises for "repugnant" actions of soldiers in Afghanistan
"Officials launched a damage limitation exercise after an investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel uncovered 4000 photographs which appeared to document abuses carried out by US troops in Afghanistan.
The magazine said it had published three graphic photographs over the weekend to document a war which had "lost sight of its original objectives."
One picture shows a US soldier casually smoking a cigarette while posing with a partially naked corpse. In a second, another member of the same unit grins as he holds up the dead man's head like a trophy. The third shows two blood-soaked bodies bound to a small pillar.
Last year, 12 US soldiers were charged with crimes ranging from murder to keeping body parts as war trophies after allegedly forming a self-styled "Kill Squad" while they were deployed in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar province.
One of the men featured in the three published photographs, Jeremy Morlock, a US Army specialist, is charged with the murder of three Afghan civilians, assaulting a fellow soldier and "wrongfully photographing and possessing visual images of human casualties."
