Little Robina took her seat wearing a deep-red head covering and a nervous smile, ready to tell her story. She giggled as any 7-year-old in the spotlight might.
But when the questions began,
what she recalled seemed impossibly dark: how she hid behind her father when the gunman came to their village that night, how the stranger fired, and how her father died, cursing in pain and anger.
"I was standing behind my father," she testified simply, by video feed from Afghanistan Saturday night during a hearing for the soldier accused of killing 16 civilians, including nine children, in Kandahar Province. "He shot my father."
One of the bullets struck her in the leg, but she didn't realize it right away, she said.
[...]
The stories recounted by the villagers have been harrowing. They described torched bodies, a son finding his wounded father, and boys cowering behind a curtain while others screamed "We are children! We are children!"
Bales sat quietly throughout, betraying no reaction to what he heard.
Robina's friend, Zardana, now 8, also testified, but only briefly to describe what the shooter was wearing.
Zardana suffered a gunshot wound to the top of her head, and when she arrived at a nearby military base, the doctors focused on treating the other injured victims first.
They figured Zardana had no chance of surviving.
After two months at a military hospital in Afghanistan and three more at a Navy hospital in San Diego,
she can walk and talk again.
Before she testified, Zardana sat at the witness table sipping from a pink juice box through a pink straw. A loose head covering and a barrette held her dark brown hair out of her face.
[...]
Sadiquallah, a slight boy of about 13 or 14 whose head rose just above his chair at the witness table, described being awakened by a neighbor screaming that an American had "killed our men."
He said he and another boy, Zardana's brother, ran to hide in a storage room and ducked behind a curtain. It provided no protection from the bullet that grazed his head and fractured his skull. Sadiquallah said the shooter had a gun and a light, but he could not identify the man.
The other child was hit in the thigh and also survived. That boy, Rafiullah, testified Saturday that an American had attacked them and put a gun in his sister's mouth.
His father, Samiullah, was away when the shootings occurred, and testified that by the time he returned the next morning, his two wounded children had been driven to a base for treatment. He found his mother among the four corpses at the compound.
"I just saw her, I cried, and I could not look on her face," he said.
[...]
One Army Criminal Investigations Command special agent testified that several months after the massacre, she took a statement from one woman whose husband was killed. The woman reported that there were two soldiers in her room – one took her husband out of the room and shot him, and the other held her back when she tried to follow.
But other eyewitnesses reported that there was just one shooter, and several soldiers have testified that Bales returned to his base at Camp Belambay, just before dawn, alone and covered in blood.
A video taken from a surveillance blimp also captured a sole figure returning to the base.
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Originally Posted by Cape Town Girl
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