Featured Image Credit: UNILAD
Topics: Military
Poppy Bilderbeck
A former sniper in the British Army has revealed how he inadvertently broke the world record for the longest kill.
Craig Harrison was on a mission in 2009 in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan when he shot from a distance of 2,475 metres (2,707 yards), and breaking the world record in the process.
Reflecting on what was the most dangerous mission of his career, Harrison has since spoken out about the incident, and what caused him to pull the trigger.
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Harrison explained how a patrol had walked into a 'kill zone', 'where it's easy to kill you, a zone of land where it's open and you have nowhere to hide, and they can just mow you down, and they moved into this kill zone and got opened up on'.
Detailing the incident, Harrison said he saw a 'flicker in the distance' that he worked out was an 'insurgent with a radio, and the flicker was the antenna'.
However, his attention was soon drawn to the patrol of 12 men, where he noticed 'random splashes were happening'.
'I was wondering what they were. And I was looking everywhere, everywhere that I engaged a target I was looking, couldn't find anything, the only place I didn't look was where I saw the guy with the radio,' he explained.
'And I looked up and I could see two guys with a PKM, a belt fed rotary machine gun, and they were hammering down on the lads,' he recalled.
However, Harrison was a total of 2,475 metres away from the two Taliban members, and his rifle only shot 1,500 metres.
'So I had to, I call it lobbing, so I lobbed a bullet in. It took me nine shots to get there, because I was bracketing, and what bracketing is, is that you fire the first shot, see where it lands, add a bit more on, add a bit more, add a bit more on, until you hit it,' he explained.
Harrison 'managed to hit the compound wall' and then next to one of the insurgents.
'So I fired again. As I fired again, he stood up and I hit him here. He fell backwards, and then the second guy stood up and I fired a third shot. And as I fired a third shot, I moved my rifle across and fired a fourth shot, so now I've got two bullets in the air at the same time. Third one missed, fourth one hit him and it hit him in the side. It was 2,475 metres,' he said.
The previous world's longest kill was nearly 50 metres shorter than the length Harrison fired at. It took place in Afghanistan in 2002.
Harrison didn't realise until his medal's parade that he had broken the world record, though he said doesn't feel proud 'at all' for setting the record. His shots now rank the third-longest confirmed kills.
Harrison said he was simply 'doing my job, trying to save 12 guys, that was it'.
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