One of the thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents controversially released Sunday by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks shows that a Canadian military photographer who died in a 2007 helicopter crash that also killed six other NATO troops was the victim of a heat-seeking missile fired by Taliban forces, shedding new light on a previously downplayed threat in the Afghan war zone.
The destruction of the American CH-47 Chinook transport chopper on May 30, 2007, killed 30-year-old Master Cpl. Darrell Jason Priede an Ontario-born, New Brunswick-based photographer who took pictures for the Canadian military publications Combat Camera and Army News along with one British and five U.S. soldiers.
But, according to a U.S. military report made public by WikiLeaks and highlighted Sunday by the New York Times, one of three news agencies given weeks of advance access to the massive database of classified documents, witnesses quickly identified the weapon used in the helicopter strike near Kandahar as a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile rather than a rocket-propelled grenade as widely reported.