Regarding the shooting of freed Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena:

“Don’t believe a word of the U.S. version,” said Oliviero Diliberto, secretary of the Italian Communist Party. “There’s an attempt to mask what actually happened. The Americans deliberately fired on the Italians.”

The Guardian quotes several other Italians making Easonesque assertions:

Enzo Bianco, the opposition head of the parliamentary committee that oversees Italy’s secret services, described the American account as unbelievable. ‘They talk of a car travelling at high speed, and that is not possible because there was heavy rain in Baghdad and you can’t travel at speed on that road,’ Bianco said. ‘They speak of an order to stop, but we’re not sure that happened.’

Pier Scolari, Sgrena’s partner who flew to Baghdad to collect her, put an even more sinister construction on the events, suggesting in a television interview that Sgrena was the victim of a deliberate ambush. ‘Giuliana may have received information which led to the soldiers not wanting her to leave Iraq alive,’ he claimed.

A military press release cited by CNN paints quite a different picture:

U.S. troops “attempted to warn the driver to stop by hand and arm signals, flashing white lights, and firing warning shots in front of the car,” the statement said. “When the driver didn’t stop, the soldiers shot into the engine block, which stopped the vehicle.”

Who to believe?

Charles Johnson offers this assessment:

The details of this situation have been described in so many different ways that it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of what happened—and mainstream media has predictably ignored Sgrena’s radical anti-war background…. I’m much more inclined to take the word of US troops than an Italian anti-war journalist.

Ditto.

Associated Press says President Bush has promised a full investigation.

Rusty Shackleford has much more here.

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