Body of MIA US Sailor Found

The search for a US sailor who went missing after a Taliban ambush has ended with the grim discovery of the murdered sailor's body on Wednesday.

The second U.S. sailor who went missing in eastern Afghanistan last week has been found dead and his body recovered.

The discovery Wednesday ended the urgent manhunt that began Friday evening when two U.S. Navy service members drove away from Camp Julien on the outskirts of Kabul and ended up in an apparent Taliban ambush in Logar province.

The two men, Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin McNeley, 30, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., and Petty Officer 3rd Class Jarod Newlove, 25, from the Seattle area, worked at NATO's counter-insurgency academy, where soldiers learn best practices in how to fight the Afghan war, NATO officials said.

U.S. troops recovered McNeley's body Sunday morning, but they held out hope that Newlove might be alive and could be found in the Charkh district area of Logar, where he was believed captured. But Wednesday evening, Newlove's body was found in Charkh in a village called Yousef, said Din Mohammad Darwish, a spokesman for the Logar governor.

Darwish said Newlove had been shot three times and might have been wounded in an initial attack Friday evening as the sailors drove their armored SUV through the area. NATO officials said that Newlove's body was found in the water and that he appeared to have been beaten to death.

By: Shelldrake