'What sounded like a warning shot was followed by a cacophony of bullets slicing into the car.' Chris Hondros, the photographer who captured the moment when US soldiers killed the parents of six children in Iraq, describes what he saw.
It was a routine foot patrol in Iraq: a dozen or so men from a platoon, carefully walking the dusky streets of Tal Afar just after sundown.
Usually little more happens than finding someone out after curfew, patting him down and then sending him home. On daylight patrols, troops sometimes stop to briefly play with children or even drink tea. On evening patrols - past curfew - no one is on the streets, and the men are extra-vigilant and professional.
Tal Afar is an ethnically-mixed town, primarily Turkoman, and had only days before been the scene of a gun battle between US forces and local insurgents.
On the evening of January 18th, as we made our way up a broad boulevard, I could see a car making its way towards us. As a defence against potential car-bombs, it is now standard practice for foot patrols to stop oncoming vehicles, particularly after dark.
"We have a car coming," someone called out as we entered an intersection. We could see the car about 100 metres away.
The car continued coming. I could not see it any more from my perch, but could hear its engine now, a high whine which sounded more like acceleration than slowing down. It was maybe 50 yards away now.
"Stop that car!" someone shouted out, seemingly simultaneously with someone firing what sounded like warning shots - a staccato, measured burst. The car continued coming. Then, perhaps less than a second later, there was a cacophony of fire - shots rattling off in a chaotic, overlapping din. The car entered the intersection on its own momentum, and still shots were penetrating it and slicing into it. Finally, the shooting stopped, the car drifted listlessly, clearly no longer being steered, and came to a halt on a curb. Soldiers began to approach it warily.
The sound of children crying came from the car. I walked up to it and a teenaged girl with her head covered emerged from the back, wailing and gesturing wildly. After her came a boy, tumbling on to the ground from the seat, already trailing a pool of blood.
"Civilians!" someone shouted, and soldiers ran up. More children - it ended up being six, all told - began to emerge, crying, their faces mottled with streaks of blood. The soldiers carried them to the nearby pavement.
It was by now almost completely dark. Working only with the aid of lights mounted on the ends of rifles, an army medic began assessing the children's injuries, running his hands up and down their bodies, looking for wounds.
Incredibly, the only injuries were a girl with a cut hand and a boy with a superficial gash in the small of his back which was bleeding heavily but was not life-threatening. The medic immediately began to bind it while the boy crouched against a wall.
From the pavement, I could see into the bullet-riddled windscreen more clearly. The driver of the car, a man, had been penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured. A woman also lay dead in the front, still covered in her Muslim clothing and harder to see.
Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their cuts or trying to comfort them. The army's translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting: "Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!"
There was a small delay in getting the armoured vehicles lined up and ready, but soon the convoy moved to the main Tal Afar hospital. This was fairly large and surprisingly well equipped, with sober-looking doctors in white coats ambling about its sea-green halls.
The young children were carried in by soldiers and by their teenaged sister. Only the boy with the gash on his back needed any further medical attention, and the army medic and an Iraqi doctor quickly chatted over his prognosis, deciding that his wound would be easy to treat.
The US army informed me that it would be holding a full investigation into the shooting.
* Chris Hondros is a New York-based staff photographer with Getty Images. He was born in New York in 1970 and studied photo-journalism at Ohio University's School of Visual Communications.
In 2001 he was awarded a fellowship at the Johns Hopkins' Pew Centre for International Journalism in Washington DC, documenting the results of large-scale oil and gas drilling in Nigeria, and he was the recipient of the 1999 photo-journalism grant from the US Agency for International Development for his work in Kosovo.
In 2003 he was a nominated finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News Photography Category.