WASHINGTON - Italian and US reports on the death of an Italian agent killed by American troops in Iraq differ in some areas but are not "diametrically opposed," the US State Department said Tuesday.
The department sought to play down the diverging accounts of the March 4 shooting of Nicolas Calipari, cut down in a car outside Baghdad Airport as he was accompanying a newly freed Italian hostage.
"The reports do differ in some ways but they're not diametrically opposed, I think," spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
"They do have a few differences on facts and they do give some different weights to different aspects of factors that contributed to the accident," he said.
The US report absolved US troops of blame in the shooting and said the Italians' car was traveling too fast. Italian investigators attributed the incident to the inexperience and stress levels of the American soldiers.
Boucher stood by the US version but said, "I think the reports do come together and say that this is not in any way an intentional act against the Italians or the Italian secret service or the Italian hostage."
He said both showed "that there are no grounds for assigning particular individual responsibility to the American soldiers that were involved in the incident."
Boucher confirmed that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to her Italian counterpart Gianfranco Fini by telephone Tuesday and they underlined the continuing strong relations between the close Iraq war allies.
05/03/2005 18:36 GMT