Jessica Lynch was raped, biographer claims

By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles

The much-sensationalised story of Jessica Lynch, the US army private airlifted to safety from a dilapidated hospital after she was ambushed and wounded in southern Iraq, was given another twist yesterday after her official biographer disclosed evidence that she had been raped at the moment of her capture.

The revelation coincides with the forthcoming publication of the book I Am A Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story and has yet to be subjected to the sort of scrutiny which has already amended many of the more breathlessly melodramatic accounts of Private Lynch's ordeal.

But it immediately fed into the seemingly limitless appetite of cable news stations and TV talk shows apparently more interested in continuing their beatification of the 19-year-old from West Virginia than they are in examining the consequences of the US invasion itself.

According to advance reports, Private Lynch's ghost writer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Rick Bragg, has unearthed an intelligence report and some kind of medical record indicating that she was sodomised around the time that her vehicle crashed and came under attack outside the town of al-Nasiriyah on March 23.

"The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead," Mr Bragg writes.

Ms Lynch herself cannot help establish the chain of events because she has no memory of them. Mr Bragg continues: "Jessi lost three hours. She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the Humvee, in the torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it."

Since the book will not be publicly available until next Tuesday - Veterans Day in the United States - it is not clear exactly what evidence Mr Bragg has managed to unearth.

Some details were nevertheless provided yesterday by Diane Sawyer, the ABC television host, whose own exclusive interview with Ms Lynch will also air next Tuesday.

"The book does indeed cite some intelligence reports that she was treated brutally and a medical record which says, in the book, that she was a victim of a sodomizing rape," Ms Sawyer said on her morning news show.

"I talked to both her and her parents about this, and asked them about the decision to put it in the book, and they told me that it was a decision to tell the reality, not selective parts of a story of going to war."

The rape story raises some questions, not least because so much of the Jessica Lynch story has already been discredited as a less than honest propaganda opportunity for the Pentagon.

Initial reports that she was caught up in a firefight, and kept shooting her M-16 until she was herself riddled with bullets, have proved to be completely inaccurate. Controversy still rages, too, whether the armed raid launched to rescue her was strictly necessary to free her from doctors all too willing to hand her over, or whether it was staged for the TV cameras.

Why, one might ask, has it taken so long for the alleged rape to be made public? Did the Iraqi doctors who tended to Ms Lynch know about it, and if so why did they keep quiet about it when interviewed by dozens of journalists investigating the original rescue story?

Mr Bragg was not commenting yesterday, while his publisher and the Lynch family both issued pleas to see the episode as just one moment in a long ordeal, not something to be dwelled on unnecessarily.

Six months after the fact, America clearly remains in the grip of Jessica Lynch mania - capitalising on what the entertainment newspaper Variety has described as "the one truly 'feel-good' moment from the war in Iraq".

Mr Bragg's book will be the second in as many weeks to hit the bookstore shelves, and a TV movie recounting her adventures is due to be aired on NBC on Sunday night.

Ms Lynch herself, meanwhile, has just announced her plans to get married to an army sergeant next summer - a perfect fairy-tale ending to the seemingly irresistible narrative of American innocence wronged, brutalised and then set back to rights again.

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Herald Feature: Iraq