UNITED KINGDOM: The Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry has said that claims that he was boasting when he wrote in his memoir about killing 25 Taliban people while on duty in Afghanistan are a “most dangerous lie.”
“Without a doubt, the most dangerous lie that they have told is that I somehow boasted about the number of people I killed in Afghanistan,” Harry told a US TV show, adding that his “words are not dangerous,” but the spin on his “words is very dangerous.”
On US television, he accused the media of misinterpreting his words, saying this spin has endangered his family.
Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, was published on Tuesday, but before its official release, some experts from the book were leaked, revealing many sensational claims and accusations.
One of Harry’s most striking claims was the killing of 25 Taliban fighters when he was serving as a military helicopter pilot, describing the killing as “removing chess pieces from the board.”
Some military figures as well as the Tabilan administration have criticised Duke’s claim of kiling 25 talibani and dubbing the dead as “chess pieces.”
Ex-army officer Col. Richard Kemp, who supervised soldiers in Afghanistan, expressed his concern about allusions to deceased Taliban insurgents as chess pieces, saying that such statements could serve as “propaganda to the enemy.”
Around 400,000 copies of the memoir Spare have been purchased, and it has become the fastest-selling non-fiction book in UK history.
In Spare, Duke discloses for the first time that he killed 25 enemy combatants during two tours in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
“So, my number is 25.” “It wasn’t a statistic that filled me with satisfaction, but it also didn’t embarrass me,” he writes. “When I was plunged into the heat and confusion of battle, I didn’t think of those as 25 people.” “You can’t kill people if you see them as people.”
“In truth, you can’t hurt people if you see them as people.” “They were chess pieces taken off the board; bad guys were eliminated before they killed good guys.”
Duke said that he wanted to be open about his time in Afghanistan and to create a safe space for other veterans to do the same “without any shame.”
Defending his remarks, he continued that his whole goal in revealing that detail was to reduce veteran suicides.
The 38-year-old said in an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show that it had been “hurtful and challenging” to watch the responses after the leak of his book.
Harry also asserted that Buckingham Palace tried to undermine the tales told in his memoir with the help of the British press.
Prince criticised the British media for leaking his book, saying: “They intentionally chose to strip away all the context and pick out particular segments of my life, my story, and every experience I’ve had, and turned it into a salacious headline.”
Also Read: Prince Harry Makes a Shocking Revelation in a New Documentary on Netflix
