The reason for the discrepancy between the date given by the soldier and the one given by Bales' attorney for the bombing is not clear.
In an AP report which again quotes the two Afghan officials who have said there was only one gunman in the killings, the provincial governor and the local police chief, the Pentagon seems to place itself in direct contradiction to Bales' attorney, by denying there was any roadside bomb at all:
"In Washington, the Pentagon disputed a claim by villagers that there was a roadside bombing the day before the shooting attack, wounding some soldiers, and the shooting spree was retaliation.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby, told reporters that U.S. officials had no indication that such a bombing happened."
It is unclear if the Pentagon is misspoken or engaging in a bit of word gamesmanship when it denies a bombing "the day before the shooting attack." Bales' lawyer says the bombing was two days before, not one.
The provincial governor in the report had told AP at one point:
"It is time for Afghanistan to calm down and not let the insurgents take advantage of this case. They want foreign troops to leave such areas like this so they can hold those areas. We should be aware of their intentions and try to help the government, not the insurgents."
The report follows survivors' testimony of multiple shooters, and the military's whisking away of surviving wounded witnesses from an Afghan hospital before they were scheduled to be interviewed by Bales' defense team.
Bales' attorney Brown issued the following statement at the end of March:
""We are facing an almost complete information blackout from the government, which is having a devastating effect on our ability to investigate the charges preferred against our client," the defense team statement said.
"When we tried to interview the injured civilians being treated at Kandahar Hospital we were denied access and told to coordinate with the prosecution team. The next day the prosecution team interviewed the civilian injured. We found out shortly after the prosecution interviews of the injured civilians that the civilians were all released from the hospital and there was no contact information for them,""
The LA Times reported attorney Browne saying:
""People on our staff in Afghanistan went to the hospital where there supposedly were eyewitnesses to this " and we were told by the prosecutors to come back the next day, which is fine. We went back the next day, and they'd all been released from the hospital and they'd all been scattered throughout Afghanistan. That was a violation of the trust we had in the prosecutors,"...
"They were promised to be there, and they were not," he said, adding that there isn't much hope of finding the witnesses now. "People just disappear into the Afghan countryside.""
Yalda Hakim, a journalist for SBS Dateline in Australia and the first western reporter to gain access to child witnesses in the shooting, recorded accounts of many men with "flashlights" on the ends of their rifles and on their helmets. As carried by MSNBC:
""the children told Hakim that other Americans were present during the rampage, holding flashlights in the yard.
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