American troops allegedly committed theft and vandalism at Baghdad International Airport, causing millions of dollars worth of damages.

Time magazine cites US officials, Iraqi Airways staff and other airport workers in its story of US troops stealing duty-free items, needlessly shooting up the airport, and trashing five serviceable Boeing airplanes.

"I don't want to detract from all the great work that's going into getting the airport running again," said Lieutenant John Welsh, the army civil-affairs officer in charge of bringing the airport back into operation. "But you've got to ask if this could have been avoided; did we shoot ourselves in the foot here?"

What was then called Saddam International Airport fell to soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division on April 3. Time quotes airport workers as saying that for the next two weeks, soldiers stationed in the airport's main terminal helped themselves to items in the duty-free shop including alcohol, cassettes, perfume, cigarettes and expensive watches.

Welsh, who arrived in Iraq in late April, was so alarmed at the theft that he rounded up a group of Iraqi airport staff members to help him clean out the shop and its storage area. He locked everything in two containers and turned them over to the shop's owner, Time said.

"The man had tears in his eyes when I showed him what we had saved," Welsh is quoted as saying. "He thought he'd lost everything."

Coalition soldiers also vandalized the airport, American sources say. A boardroom table that Welsh and Iraqi civil-aviation authority officials had sat around in early May was, a week later, a pile of glass and splintered wood.

Terminal windows were smashed, and almost every door in the building was broken, says Welsh.

Time says its photographer, who flew out of the airport on April 12, saw wrecked furniture and English-language graffiti throughout the airport office building, as well as a sign warning that soldiers caught vandalizing or looting would be court-martialed.

"There was no chance this was done by Iraqis" before the airport fell, says a senior Pentagon official. "The airport was secure when this was done."

The airplanes were the biggest sufferers. Of the 10 Iraqi Airways jets on the tarmac when the airport fell, five were found to be serviceable in a US inspection in early May: three 727s, a 747 and a 737.

Over the next few weeks, though, U.S. soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of the planes' fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and popped out every windshield.

"It's unlikely any of the planes will fly again," Welsh, a reservist who works for the aviation firm Pratt and Whitney as a quality-control liaison officer to Boeing, was quoted as saying.

US estimates of the cost of the damage and theft begin at a few million dollars and go as high as 100 million dollars.

Airport workers say even now air conditioners and other equipment are regularly stolen.

"Soldiers do this stuff all the time, everywhere. It's warfare," a US military official told the magazine.

"If we're here to rebuild the country," argues Welsh, "then anything we break we have to fix. We need to train these guys to go from shoot it up to securing infrastructure. Otherwise we're just making more work for ourselves. And we have to pay for it."

Press Trust of India