Video claims Marines urinated on corpses

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Marine Corps said it is investigating the origins of a video posted on the Internet that claims to show Marines urinating on the corpses of insurgents.

The video, which surfaced on Web sites Wednesday, portrays four Marines in combat gear laughing as they urinate while standing over three bodies of Taliban militants, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

A caption states the Marines are attached to a scout sniper team with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., some of whom were deployed to Afghanistan last year and returned in September.

Capt. Kendra N. Hardesty, a Marine Corps spokesman, said officials would "fully investigate" the issue but haven't been able to verify the clip's authenticity or if battalion members were involved.

"The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps," she said in a statement Wednesday.

The Post said independently identifying the source or the people in the video was difficult.

The caption said the corpses were "dead Talibans," but it wasn't clear whether they were fighters or civilians.

In 2010, members from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division took pictures of themselves with corpses of Afghan civilians shot by a self-proclaimed "kill team" of rogue soldiers. In that case, the Army confiscated hundreds of photographs and kept them out of the public domain for months. Some later were obtained and published by Rolling Stone and the German publication Der Spiegel.