When You Can’t Find A Witness, Just Quote Yourself

Good grief…

U.S. fire scatters crowd after Afghan bomb: witness
By Noor Mohammad Sherzai
BATI KOT, Afghanistan (Reuters) – At least one U.S. soldier opened fire to scatter a crowd of civilians and police on Thursday after failed suicide bomb attacks on a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military and witnesses said.
A car bomb targeting a U.S. convoy in the village of Bati Kot, 15 km (9 miles) east of Jalalabad, killed the driver, two passengers and a nearby civilian, but none of the soldiers was hurt, the U.S. military said in a statement.
Afghan police securing the site in eastern Afghanistan were then attacked by an insurgent dressed in police uniform. He was killed by the police and coalition troops before he could detonate his suicide vest, the statement said.
To add to the confusion, a fire brigade vehicle speeding to the scene rammed into the U.S. and Afghan vehicles.
“I saw the fire brigade vehicle rushing to the area at top speed. Somehow its brakes failed and hit one police vehicle and coalition vehicles, then the Americans started firing,” said Reuters correspondent Noor Mohammad Sherzai.

So the premise of the article is that a witness saw at least one US soldier scatter a crowd around an Afghan suicide bombing by opening fire, and that one witness just happens to also be the author of the story.
Professional. You can’t tell me that in the entire crowd with Sherzai couldn’t fine one single person to get a quote from aside from himself.
By the way, you gotta love how they make it sound as though the troop started firing into the crowd of police and civilians to disperse them. We don’t learn until the end of the article that the soldier fired shots away from the crowd in order to break them up in case there should be another bombing.
No bias here. Move along.

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  • http://Array MikeAdamson

    I don’t recall reading a reporter quoting himself in a story…I hope this isn’t a trend.

  • robert108

    MikeA: If you have any questions about Reuters’ credibility, Google “fauxtography”.

  • http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/author/Anna/ Anna

    Makes you kind of wonder what these people reported before the war. :roll:

  • robert108

    I hope this isn’t a trend.

    Fabricating news is already a “trend” with Reuters.

  • WOOFX

    You did not read the other pages of the article.

    “I was running away as fast as I could, but some of the police overtook me,” Sherzai said. The police, he said, “were very angry because the Americans were shooting and wanted to shoot back but others stopped them”.

    “A bullet hit the ground between my legs while I was running,” said Takiullah Taki, a cameraman for private Afghan channel Tolo TV. “Some Afghan national police wanted to shoot back, but others said that would make the situation deteriorate further so they did not.”

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