万花筒 2009-05-16&05-17 美国大兵枪杀战友（在线收听）

What we understand at this point from the U.S. military that at least five US soldiers have been killed at the hands of another US soldier. We understand the US soldier who did the shooting is in custody, his condition is unclear now, all of these happened at Camp Liberty, which is a very big sprawling base out by Bagdad’s International Airport. We understand that the shooting itself happened at a stress center where US soldiers are treated for PTSD. It’s not clear at this point if the shooter himself was being treated at this stress center. Hala.

“So what, So basically that’s all we know, do we know the nationalities of the people who were killed, do we know what the nationality of the alleged shooter at this point? “

“We do, we, we've heard from the US military that the five killed were US troops and that the shooter was an US soldier, we know that because we've heard from a colonel ,who said it’s always tougher when it’s one of your own, he said our hearts go out to the families and friends of all the service members involved in this terrible tragedy. We can also read between the lines in the press release, they are holding back the names of those who were killed, until the Defense Department can notify next of kin which is of course through a standard operating procedure, they don’t wanna release the names in the public until they’ve notified the families back home in the United States.

“All right. And tell us for those who don’t know, on a US army base you need to basically walk in with a certain set of procedures with regards to your weapons, this didn't happened obviously in this case.“

“Yeah. The normal procedure for US troops when they come off a patrol is they go from what’s called a “red-zone” into a “green zone”, and what they do is they actually will clear their weapons so the HMMWVs will actually stop at the outer edge of the base and they will clear their weapons or take the clips out of their weapons and they walk around the base with those weapons unloaded. Now the purpose for that is really to make sure there is no accidental discharge of weapons because that of course can happen quite easily, so the people that are on a US base that are armed are usually only military police, or they are personal security guards for the sort of top, senior officials who are on these bases, but clearly, as you said, this didn't happen now just because these weapons are unloaded and as a standard operating procedure, US soldiers of course keep their ammunition with them, they keep their guns with them, so you can tell how this could easily happen, Hala."