March 24, 2003	Monday	Muharram 20, 1424

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DOHA, March 23: Al Jazeera TV on Sunday broadcast images of several bodies, apparently of US soldiers killed in Iraq, with five prisoners, including two wounded, one of them a woman.

The dead wore bloodstained camouflage uniforms and some appeared to have bullet wounds on the head.

Three of the captured soldiers said they were from Texas, including the woman who identified herself as Shauna, aged 30, and one, a sergeant who identified himself as James Reilly, from New Jersey.

Both were from the 507th Maintenance Company.

Al Jazeera said the soldiers were captured on the outskirts of Nasiriyah town in central Iraq.

Peter C. Miller of Kansas was asked in English why he had come to fight the Iraqi people, with Iraqi television microphones in front of him.

“I didn’t come here to kill anyone. I was told to shoot only if shot at,” he said.

A soldier who gave his first name as Joseph and said he was from Texas told journalists: “I follow orders”.

Asked repeatedly if the Iraqi people he encountered had greeted him with flowers or guns he replied: “I don’t understand.”

Another soldier named Edgar from Texas had a facial wound, said through an interpreter that he had arrived in Iraq from Kuwait.

US Army Staff Sergeant John Alleman at the American command center in Doha condemned the broadcast. “It kind of makes me mad that they’re showing the bodies. They’re just parading them. Morally it’s wrong. We don’t go around parading their bodies, especially on television.”—AFP