Ten U.S. Marines killed near the Iraqi city of Fallujah last week had been at a promotion ceremony and were not on foot patrol as initially reported, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.
The Marines were in an old flour mill on the outskirts of the city to celebrate the promotion of three soldiers, a military statement said.
As the ceremony ended, the Marines dispersed and one of them is believed to have stepped on a buried pressure plate linked to explosives that caused the devastating blast.
The death toll was the largest suffered by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in a single incident since August.
Eleven Marines were wounded in the explosion, which the military initially blamed on “an improvised explosive device fashioned from several large artillery shells.”
The attack was particularly ill-timed for the Americans, coming just a day after President George W. Bush had given a speech outlining his strategy for Iraq and saying he would settle for “nothing less than complete victory.”
In November last year, Fallujah witnessed the biggest battle since the U.S. invasion of 2003. Dozens of troops and hundreds of Iraqis were killed in the city, 30 miles west of Baghdad, as the Americans tried to bring it under control.
