IRAQ: To the Americans it was justified self-defence, to most residents it was murder.
What is beyond dispute is that 14 Iraqis were dead yesterday and 70 wounded lay in the main hospital, surrounded by angry family members, after US troops fired on a crowd of demonstrators.
The shooting late on Monday night was the bloodiest incident since the fall of Saddam Hussein. It occurred 65km west of Baghdad in an overwhelmingly Sunni town which had been quiet for two weeks until the Americans arrived.
By yesterday the mood was changed. Tempers were charged as demonstrators chanted slogans and waved their fists across coils of razor wire at men of the 82nd Airborne Division, the US army's elite paratroopers, who had commandeered a school in a residential street.
They were the ones who fired the fatal shots in what they insisted was return fire.
According to the Americans, tension had been mounting in the town for most of Monday as a few supporters of the former Iraqi president moved around, celebrating his 66th birthday and firing into the air. American commanders toured the area with loudspeakers, warning in Arabic that the firing could be perceived as a threat and be met with deadly force.
The crowd also included people with complaints about US checkpoints and demands that the Americans leave the school so that children could return to classes. They first gathered outside a US command post close to the town hall, then marched a few hundred yards to the main US post in the school. This was where the killing occurred.
Lieut Col Eric Nantz was not at the scene at the time but he insisted yesterday that people in the crowd fired the first shots at troops in the school. "They came under heavy fire. The troops on the roof returned fire. We later found eight AK-47s on the ground and nearby rooftops, and over 50 expended rounds. I don't know if it was planned," he said.
Cradling a machine gun, a soldier who was in the school during the shooting and who refused to give his name gave a more emotional account. As well as single shots fired from their M4 rifles, US troops had used machine guns, he conceded.
Monday night's incident was not the first. "We've been sitting here taking fire for three days. It was enough to get your nerves wracked. When they marched down the road and started shooting at the compound there was nothing left for us to do but defend ourselves. They were firing from alleyways and buildings where we couldn't see."
Asked whether the troops could have mistaken shots fired into the air to celebrate Saddam Hussein's birthday with fire aimed at the US compound, the soldier insisted bullets had been coming over the roof of the building.
No bullet holes were visible yesterday on the school, unlike the house opposite which had several holes.
Lying in hospital with his right foot amputated, Mr Musana Saleh abdel Latif (41), the house's owner, gave a different version. "They just shot at the protesters. Some of the wounded tried to take cover in my front yard.
"My wife and I started to pull them in. I was hit in the foot. My wife was hit in both legs. My brother, Walid, came to take me to hospital, and he was shot and killed. Another brother, Osama, tried to get the car out to take us off and he was shot and injured."
Told that the Americans claimed to have been responding to fire from the crowd, he responded: "They are lying. They're ready to shoot for any reason. They're criminals."
Asked whether he ever considered it might be better to place his forces on the edge of town, Lieut Col Nantz said: "No, I never considered that at all. You need to be engaged. You can't do that if you're sitting outside. We want to help them build themselves up and build a police force and so on."