By Robert Fisk

6 May 2004 “The Independent” — The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. “Someone wounded,” the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: “Hit him, hit the truck and him.” As the helicopter’s gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

British and most European television stations censored the tape off the air last night on the grounds that the pictures were too terrible to show. But deliberately shooting a wounded man is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and this extraordinary film of US air crews in action over Iraq is likely to create yet another international outcry.