LONDON (AP) — Accounts of prisoner abuse and civilian killings in Iraq that are contained in a trove of leaked United States military documents are extremely serious and must be investigated, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said Sunday. The 391,832 documents, which are mainly field reports by soldiers on the ground, detail daily carnage in Iraq since the 2003 United States-led invasion. They include reports of detainees abused by Iraqi forces, insurgent bombings, sectarian executions and civilians shot at checkpoints by American troops.
Iraq Body Count, a private group in Britain that has tracked the number of civilians killed since the war started in March 2003, said it had analyzed the documents, which were released Friday by WikiLeaks, the independent organization that obtained them, and found 15,000 previously unreported deaths.
Mr. Clegg told BBC television that it was not for Britain to tell the United States how to respond, but that any allegations of abuse by British troops “are extremely serious and need to be looked at.
“People will want to hear what the answer is to what are very, very serious allegations of a nature which I think everybody will find quite shocking,” he said.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, has examined the files in detail and said it found two cases in which Iraqis reported being abused by British troops.
Mr. Clegg’s Liberal Democrats opposed the invasion of Iraq, and he has called the war illegal. His party, in opposition when the war began, is now part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-led ruling coalition.
Britain is holding an official inquiry into mistakes made by British officials in the build-up and aftermath of the Iraq invasion. A report is expected later this year.
WikiLeaks made the documents available to several news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian. As it did with secret documents released in August by WikiLeaks covering six years of the war in Afghanistan, The Times redacted or withheld any documents that would put lives in danger or jeopardize continuing military operations.
The Pentagon and Britain’s Ministry of Defense condemned the leak, both saying it could put soldiers’ lives at risk.
