A respected author and former Royal Marine has told how he shot two badly wounded men during battle to “put them out of their misery” 65 years ago. Neal Ascherson, 84, spoke for the first time about the killings to lend his support to the campaign to quash the conviction and sentence of Alexander Blackman, known as Marine A, for murdering an injured Taliban fighter. Ascherson, who shot dead two “hideously wounded” guerrillas in 1952 during the Malayan Emergency, said that British courts had failed to grasp the context of battle. He described the conviction of Blackman, who served in the same Plymouth-based unit, as a “piteous miscarriage of justice”. The author, who worked for The Observer for 30 years, is the latest in a…

Source: The Times January 26, 2017 00:05 UTC