The US military is investigating two incidents in which American soldiers killed at least 26 Iraqi civilians. They claimed that they were either guerrillas or had died in cross fire.

There is a general doubt among the Iraqi people and feel that the growing evidence of retaliatory killings of unarmed Iraqi families, often including children, by US soldiers seemingly bent on punishing Iraqis after an attack and it may spark comparisons with the massacre of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968.

The Iraqi people also alleged that the willingness of US troops generally shoot any Iraqi they see in the aftermath of an insurgent attack. But it is only now that convincing and detailed information is becoming available about the killings. How far the allegations are correct are being investigated by the US.

In the most recent incident, in the town of Ishaqi north of Baghdad last week, Iraqi police said that US troops had shot 11 people, including five children, in their home. The local police chief, Colonel Farouq Hussein, said that all the dead had been shot in the head, according to autopsies.

"It's a clear and perfect crime," he said. In an incident in the town of Haditha in western Iraq on 19 November last year, US soldiers went on a rampage in a village after a bomb attack and killed at least 15 civilians, according to witnesses and local officials cited by Time magazine in an investigation.

Full story: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article352819.ece