LONDON (Dispatches) – Rights campaigners have launched a bid to take defense officials to court over the alleged involvement of the country's soldiers in the shooting of Afghan civilians, AFP reported Monday.

Tens of thousands of classified U.S. military files published last week by whistleblower website WikiLeaks documented unusual civilian shootings in Afghanistan involving two British army units, said the Guardian newspaper.
Phil Shiner, a lawyer working on behalf of peace campaigner Maya Evans, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Liam Fox at the weekend, urging the Ministry of Defense to conduct a proper investigation, said the paper.
The campaigners say shooting deaths revealed in the files “require to be investigated as suspected war crimes”.
The documents -- which were first disclosed in the Guardian, the New York Times and German news weekly Der Spiegel -- “identify... the killing of at least 26 civilians and the wounding of a further 20 by British forces,” Shiner told Fox.
The campaigners' demand opens up the possibility of a judicial review, in which courts scrutinize the exercise of public power, said the paper.
“I am sure we will be able to get this into court,” the lawyer told the Guardian.
The Ministry of Defense has not disputed the general accuracy of the accounts revealed in the massive cache of leaked files, but officials have not given any explanation or ordered a public investigation.
The files claim that the number of civilians killed by British forces is small in comparison to those admitted by US forces, with most British units hardly appearing in the U.S. field reports, said the Guardian.
But two detachments of British soldiers appear repeatedly, according to the paper.
There is a series of four shootings of individual innocent civilians in Kabul in around a month during 2007, when the Coldstream Guards were new to the capital.
In 2008, the documents allege that Royal Marine commando units shot drivers and motorcyclists on eight occasions for approaching too close to convoys over a six-month period.
Meanwhile, following the release of 92,000 war log files, Liz Cheney is calling for WikiLeaks to be shut down and says that the founder has “blood on his hands.”
“I would point out that although you've got the news about the WikiLeaks documents that that came out this week and clearly Julian Assange's effort was to change course for the U.S. policy in Afghanistan,” Cheney told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.
“He was unsuccessful in that. He does clearly have blood on his hands potentially for the people whose names were in those documents who helped the U.S. and I think that's something he will have to live with now,” she continued.
“I would really like to see President Obama to move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that website down. I would like to see him move to shut it down ourselves if Iceland won't do it. I would like to see them move aggressively to prosecute Mr. Assange and certainly ensure that he never again gets a visa to enter the United States,” said Cheney.
“What he's done is very clearly aiding and abetting al Qaeda. And as I said, he may very well be responsible for the deaths of American soldiers Afghanistan,” she concluded