Video suggests US hit Iraq wedding

New video footage showing Iraqis celebrating a desert wedding raised more questions on Monday about a US air strike last week that killed ab...

New video footage showing Iraqis celebrating a desert wedding raised more questions on Monday about a US air strike last week that killed about 40 people.

The US Military insisted most of the dead were foreign guerrilla fighters who had slipped over the nearby Syrian border. Local people say the Americans massacred wedding guests.Associated Press Television News said it had obtained the footage from a survivor of the strike early on May 19. A Baghdad musician, a drummer who said he was the only survivor of the 10-man band which played at the party, told Reuters the film was shot on Monday, May 17 — the second of three days of wedding celebrations which ended with the attack.

The film shows pick-up trucks racing across the desert — some of the dead came from the regional capital Ramadi — men dancing in a tent, children larking about and a musician playing an electric organ. The same man later appeared dead in a shroud. Basem Ishab Mohamed, the drummer, identified the organist as Mohaned, brother of a noted Baghdad wedding singer Hussein al-Ali, who also performed at the wedding.

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Mohamed said festivities ended on Tuesday at about 10:30 pm when they said US military aircraft began circling overhead. They surveyed the area for four hours before the deadly strike at about 3 am. He escaped from a tent where male wedding guests had been asleep.

US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said on Monday some kind of celebration could have been going on during the day but after midnight ‘‘the activities that we saw happening on the ground were somewhat inconsistent with a wedding party.’’

—Reuters