Archive · 2014 · From the print edition of Friday 27 June 2014, Vol. 22, No. 6,665
NewsTen years on, candles on the highway
About a thousand people gathered at the roadside cross on the Trans-Talas Highway last night to remember the five killed at the checkpoint in 2004.
TALAS — About a thousand people stood along the Trans-Talas Highway at the western edge of Talas last night, holding candles at the roadside cross and the stone bearing five names, ten years after US military police at a checkpoint there fired on a minibus bringing a family home from a wedding.
The vigil has been held every 26 June since 2004. This year, for the tenth anniversary, the crowd was the largest since the first summer, when the shooting and the acquittal of the two soldiers that December brought the biggest protests Talas had seen since 1992. Relatives read the names, a priest of St. Tomas said prayers and the crowd sang the hymn the family had sung at the wedding.
The jurisdiction clause of the 2001 basing agreement, which sent the soldiers to a court-martial rather than an Iradi court, is still in force. A relative of the family said the young people at the vigil had been children in 2004. "They come because they have heard the story," she said. "That is all we want. That the story goes on."
Traffic on the highway slowed as it passed the candles. Several drivers of minibuses sounded their horns.