The US military has identified the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers earlier this week as Staff Sgt Robert Bales, a 38-year-old father of two.
Staff Sgt Bales had been injured twice in combat over the course of four deployments and had, his lawyer said, an exemplary military record.
The release of his name, first reported by Fox News, ended an extraordinary six-day blackout of public information about him from the Pentagon, which said it had withheld his identity so long because of concerns about his and his family's security.
An official said Staff Sgt Bales was being transferred from Kuwait to Fort Leavenworth, Kanas, home of the Army's maximum security prison.
Military officials say Bales, who has yet to be formally charged, left his small combat outpost in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province early in the morning last Sunday, walked into two nearby villages and there shot or stabbed 16 people, nine of them children.
Little more than the outlines of Staff Sgt Bales's life are publicly known. His family lived in Lake Tapps, a community about 20 miles northeast of his army post.
NBC reported that he was from Ohio, and he may have lived there until he joined the army at 27.
Staff Sgt Bales's Seattle-based lawyer, John Henry Browne, said several members of the sergeant's family moved to Washington since he was assigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Mr Browne said Staff Sgt Bales joined the army after the September 11th attacks and then spent almost all of his army career at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where he was part of the 3rd Stryker Brigade in the 2nd Infantry Division, named after the eight-wheeled armoured Stryker vehicles.
The killings have severely undermined longstanding Nato efforts to win support from villages in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, and have shaken relations with the government of president Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who this week told secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who was on a visit to Afghanistan, that he wanted US forces out of Afghan villages by next year.
Pentagon officials, who have been scouring the sergeant's military and health records for clues, have said little about what they think motivated the killings.
New York Times